‘Deserts’ Review: Moroccan Auteur Faouzi Bensaïdi Blends Absurdist Comedy and Mythic Tragedy
The bittersweet travails of two not-very-successful Casablanca-based debt collectors as they traverse the arid villages of Morocco in search of loan deadbeats eventually intersects with a tragic love story in “Deserts,” the sixth feature from Moroccan writer-director Faouzi Bensaïdi (“Mille Mois,” “WWW: What a Wonderful World”). Boasting striking Cinemascope visuals, it’s a nonlinear drama spiked with ellipses that mixes moods and genres. Those that prefer straightforward cinema with dotted I’s and crossed T’s will be out of their comfort zone here, but it looks like manna for cinephiles. Bensaïdi, who has a parallel career as an actor and theater director, is an auteur who is overdue for a retrospective Stateside.
At the beginning, Bensaïdi gives viewers a clue to the film’s unconventionality as the map that wrinkled-suit-and-tie-clad Mehdi (Fehd Benchemsi) and Hamid (Abdelhadi Taleb) are examining blows away. As the two men make their way around some picturesque but impoverished villages, the stories they hear provide a social-realist picture of what life is like without a safety net.
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The borrowers are unable to make payments as their jobs vanished, medical emergencies arose or, in one case, the debtor used the amount to pay smugglers to get him out of the country rather than open the cell phone store he described on his loan application. The increasingly frustrated Mehdi is keen to come up with some sort of solution and winds up starting payment plans that involve him taking away valuables from rugs to goats to mined kohl. However, these items are sold by the collectors who pocket the tiny proceeds.
Most of the action in the first half unreels in absurdist vignettes reminiscent of Elia Sulieman’s oeuvre and usually stuffed with visual humor, epitomized by the transformation of the men’s work car. We see Hamid, who has a hard time saying no, courting a young woman and then being taken advantage of by her alcoholic father and shrew of a mother. Meanwhile, melancholy Mehdi is trying to cope with the fact that his wife has left him and their young daughter and his mother is not up for looking after her. The scene where she suggests essentially selling the little girl to a rich woman is quietly devastating. In contrast, the funniest episode concerns what happens when Mehdi tips a hotel concierge who promises to introduce him to some women.
After being called out by their boss for their pitiful record during a company meeting in which a bevy of collectors, clad in pastel suits, shrink away from Mehdi and Hamid as if they are radioactive, the two set out to do better. But back on the road, they run into a village in the middle of nowhere without even a hotel (“What hotel?” sneers a local, “Do you think this is Marrakech?”) that is under the thrall of a criminal called Mr. Zemourri (Abdellah Echahbil). Ironically, money lender Zemourri is a very effective debt collector.
Zemourri’s connection to the attractive twins Yto and Hadda (Hajar Graigaa), which is mentioned in nervous whispers during a drunken visit to their parents, becomes clearer in the second half of the film when Mehdi and Hamid cross paths with an escaped convict (Rabii Benjhaile) and the film takes on a different ambiance, pace and visual style.
It’s clear that Bensaïdi casts his landscapes as carefully as he does his actors, while the awe-inspiring, widescreen, deep focus compositions that he and DP Florian Berutti create keep the film visually interesting even when the pace slows and the mood changes.
Whether the title refers to the emotional deserts in which most of the male characters appear to be lost or the actual interior landscape of his homeland, or both, Bensaïdi gives the viewers plenty of space to draw their own conclusions. He also makes a cameo appearance as the philosophical and friendly owner of a failed snack kiosk that is dismantled to pay his loan.
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