Raven Song Review: Saudi Arabia’s Oscar submission by director Mohamed Al Salman

It’s 2002 and it’s raining brains in Riyadh, at least from the shaky perspective of the gullible Nasser. Nasser’s doctor insists he has a brain tumor, which is his explanation for the persistent hallucinations Nasser experiences, and that he, Dr. Ahmed, is only too eager for a circumcision. Nasser is not so sure: his dreams, fantasies and visions are more enjoyable than the rest of his life, which suffers under the dual tyranny of his fanatical father and his boss at the rarely visited Dove Hotel. Why throw away the good stuff? Especially when those visions begin to include the mysterious young woman who came unannounced one day to ask for the key to room 227. She is always welcome to walk the corridors of his mind.

crow song is Mohamed Al Salman’s feature film debut and Saudi Arabia’s entry for the Oscar for Best International Feature Film following its Red Sea Film Festival debut. Ambitious but clumsy, he vacillates between surreal extravagances such as brainwashing, impromptu poetry recitations and sustained footage of Nasser’s stunned expression, all the while not dealing with the trials of his life. Asem Alawad plays Nasser as the desert version of the little bum, crushed by authority and grief; When his short-tempered father yells at him for being “a stupid goat,” you have a creeping feeling that he’s right.

The target of Nasser’s pain is a young woman in a snow-white abaya and with an incredible amount of hair (Kateryna Tkachenko) who comes to the hotel, asks for room 227, opens the desk and leaves an envelope – in which a book appear. of poetry addressed to the resident. Nasser still grumbles when a recalcitrant family arrives and demands that the Pater Familias, an old man who appears to be staggering from exhaustion, be taken to the same room. Once properly housed, he refuses to come out.

Meanwhile, Nasser’s friend Abu Sagr (Ibrahim Khairallah) convinces him that the way to win his fair lady is through a poem that he will utter as a song; While he stopped singing, he says, “and did penance for once,” he says he is ready to return to showbiz. To this end, he uses Nasser’s pseudonym “the raven” and forces a journalist to write a story about his poetic skills, which have yet to be truly tested by actual writing. Fame is what matters.

For a film full of static shots that often feel deliberately slow, crow song is scary fat. We continue. The bicycle dealer Abu Sagr, who is a tow truck driver by profession, seems to have a hand in the matter. Not long after the journalist’s article went to press, Nasser de Raaf, along with a group of poetry lovers, was crammed into the back of a windowless van set up as a club room and asked to speak in a debate between modernists and traditionalists. who they are morally taking sides against empty verse. . They drive around and argue violently until they are hit by a van full of goats. Honestly, you can’t go anywhere without bumping into a goat.

As crazy as it sounds, it is supposedly based on the Saudi reality. By the turn of the century, Saudi poets and critics argued in the columns of Riyadh’s newspapers over the correct approach to meter and rhyme, pitting the conservative classics against the free liberals in a fundamentally shifted political conflict. Apparently, this phenomenon was the director’s first inspiration.

Foreign audiences are unlikely to understand this piece of cultural history – and being shortlisted for the Oscars means foreign festival audiences are likely too – but that’s not Mohamed al Salman’s problem. In interviews at the Red Sea Festival, he said he was interested in making films that reflected his own culture and appealed to Saudi audiences at a time when the burgeoning film industry is a popular source of pride.

What this admirable uncompromising attitude means is that there is nothing to it crow song Completely beyond an outsider’s understanding, there’s a lot going on, from the sheer weirdness of the van full of poets to the aggressive way its totally unlikeable characters talk to each other, which may or may not be considered comical by local audiences. A climactic scene of brutality shatters the whimsical rom-com tone of the previous one, just as Nasser’s father does when he smashes his son’s Arabic music cassette with a hammer. Why does he do this? I do not know. Maybe that’s the real point for someone like me.