"Western anti-capitalist Moroccan"? A deceitful title, solicitor, eye-catcher? Mislead yourself! Deserts director Faouzi Bensaïd is all that, and certainly much more. This last feature – absolutely unclassifiable, running between the fingers of the one who tries to spot him – surprises both his formal qualities and his crazy freedom. A film that is now possible to catch in physical format...
The Nickeled Feet of the Desert
Mehdi (Fehd Benchemsi) and Hamid (Abdelhadi Talbi) both work for an unscrupulous collection agency. Strolling through the deep Moroccan countryside, they forage from overindebted families with overindebted families the little money they manage to take away from them...
Actor (for Bertrand Bonello or Jacques Audiard in particular), director for theatre and cinema, Faouzi Bensaïdi Here we propose an absolutely free cinema, in love with his characters but acerbic with the system he depicts. A standard freedom, allowing both poetic and tragic breakthroughs within a comedy whose margin of manoeuvre extends to pure slapstick.
Film-horizon
Unclassifiable, Deserts is more easily identifiable by its pure formal aspects. The first one that types the eye is its format – the scope – which is particularly suited to filming the recurring desert areas during the feature film. A wide plane, which allows the representation of endless horizons but also a subtle game with the placement of bodies in space: amassed bodies, separated bodies, isolated bodies... Bensaïdi plays with his actors and is the orchestrator of their locations in a framework always particularly worked.
A often broad framework, whose standard plan would be the fixed sequence plan. Taking off inserts or far too recurring field/against-field, Bensaïdi trusts the intelligence of his spectator and lets him scrutinize his image without constantly pressing every element of his decor. And this credit that the director gives to his spectator, he also sees himself in the cutting of the feature film: Deserts will be a film of the ellipse or will not be. Ellipses that support the different rocking points of the film as well as its (sometimes violent) tone breaks. Only then do the spectator start his imagination to recreate ex nihilo Missing stories...
Violent film
If in a few words we have just tried to identify the aesthetic proposal of Deserts, it takes at least a time to return to the ferocity of his anti-capitalist discourse. Organising a rapin of the very poor by the underprivileged, Bensaïdi portrays with a sharp audacity the schemes of a neoliberalism as crazy as intelligent, since it has the social strata that should on the contrary hear to kill it. A paroxystic scene, within the recovery agency where our two main characters work, depicts this wonderfully with an absolutely delicious staggered tone.
Combining chromatic exuberance and discourse of a cold violence barely coated, the scene leaves in its field a condensation of everything we described above: a use of the telescope at the inside sharp with desert landscapes and crushing its characters thanks to its slightly deformative perspectives, a true taste for the comic shift, a sharp sense of the disposition of actors to use the space of the plan. The all-embracing cynicism that makes even more masked progress and now characterizes a part of our political classes...
« I wanted this film to say a lot about the precariousness, the abandonment of entire populations, the territorial divides, and the capitalism that crushes our lives, our feelings and our emotions. »
And in this clever war of the poor against the poor orchestrated at the highest level, only the desert remains... All the characters of this Morocco-Archipel seem to be magnetized there, until the most complete abstraction, without ever explaining whether these desert expanses were their only escape against the tentacles of a capitalism crawling up to the deepest countryside (an idea of desertion, of handing over weapons), or the ultimate surrender to the die-mill that awaits us all. Deserts opens up tracks, never closes them, and offers in a handful of ultimate plans an ever more powerful breath that lures into a true contemporary masterpiece.
Tartar Deserts
In short, Deserts offers us a negative of the novel by Dino Buzzati The Tartar Desert. Or an up-to-date outgrowth, which should be grafted into the stunning work of the Italian writer, an extension that prolongs the discourse put in place in the book and pushes it further into our contemporary entrenchments. In short, a real world film, which never sacrifices his speech or his formal aspect, but manages to constantly make both dialogue. A stone-roller film, unstoppable and whose inertia will take you with it long after its viewing...
Deserts, to catch up now on physical support with as a bonus, an interview with filmmaker Faouzi Bensaïdi at the Filmmakers' Fortnight (17 min) !
Data sheet
DVD Zone B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Duration: 120 min
Release date: February 20, 2024
Video format : 576p/25 - 2.39
Soundtrack : Arab Dolby Digital 5.1 (and 2.0)
Subtitles French
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