It is 1916 in the province of Hijaz. Though on the southern periphery of the Ottoman Empire, the territory, and the pilgrimage cities of Mecca and Medina in particular, is central to the sultan’s legitimacy. The state has built the Hijaz Railway to facilitate the transport of pilgrims – and Ottoman troops – through the region. Contending forces in this theater of World War I have immense interests in securing that rail line, or severing it.
This historical footnote has a lasting place in cinema thanks to David Lean’s 1962 film classic “Lawrence of Arabia.” Inspired by “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” the 1922 autobiography of British army officer T.E. Lawrence, the film uses the geopolitical contest for control of the Arab east as a canvas to render something of the myths and realities of one man’s ambitions.
It’s often been noted that, in the way of autobiography, Lawrence’s account rather overstates his own importance in the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule – a narrative inflation to which Lean’s adaptation gestures.
“Theeb,” the debut effort of Anglo-Jordanian writer-director Naji Abu Nowar (b.1981) is, among other things, a contemporary, local response to Lean’s masterpiece, one that foregrounds an intimate tale of loyalty and revenge at the expense of geopolitics.
As the film opens, a boy stands, staring at an unmarked slate slab that acts as a grave marker. This is Theeb (Jacir Eid), the youngest of a tribal chief’s three recently orphaned sons. The oldest brother now rules the clan, while the middle brother, Hussein (Hussein Salameh), is Theeb’s guardian.
Theeb’s oldest brother has inherited one of the region’s more respectable tribes, but not all Bedouin hereabouts are respectable.
The film commences at a relaxed pace that continues for most of its 100 minutes. The two brothers are shown cavorting – playing at manhood rituals like knife-fighting and learning to fire a rifle – against spectacular juxtapositions of dun-colored stone and azure sky.
One evening a pair of strangers arrives at the camp.
One (Marji Audeh) is Bedouin, the other (Jack Fox) a blond-haired foreigner – a British army officer who might have stepped straight from Lean’s cast of extras.
Naturally Theeb is curious about the stranger and the collection of exotic objects he totes around with him – a metal case full of cigarettes, a compass, maps and a mysterious wooden box. The Englishman is violently protective of this box, as Theeb learns on the occasions that he fiddles with it.
The two strangers need a guide to escort them to a specific well some days distant on the old caravan trail. The passage is dangerous – the road has fallen into disuse since the Hijaz rail line was laid and brigands are known to frequent it – but the chief instructs his brother Hussein to guide the Englishman and his escort to their destination.
Not wanting to be separated from Hussein, and still curious about what that stranger is up to, Theeb follows them. This causes much consternation when he’s discovered but their mission is pressing enough that the men decide to take him along on their perilous journey.
“Theeb” had its world premiere at Venice this year, screening in the Orizzonti (Horizons) section – focusing on works seen to represent new directions in cinema – where it won Abu Nowar the Best Director prize. The film had its Arab world debut this week at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, where it’s screening in the New Horizons competition for first and second features.
Abu Nowar’s project had received financing from both the Doha Film Institute and Sanad (ADFF’s film fund) so the film’s reception during its debut projection at the Emirate’s Palace was rapturous – notwithstanding the fact that the lights in the theater were switched on three or four times during the screening.
Though hardly the filmic experiment that you might expect from the Orizzonti jury’s mandate to fete “new directions” in cinema, “Theeb” is an unusually accomplished first feature.
The acting of the Jordanian principals – Hassan Mutlag, whose character surfaces in the second half of the film, as well as Jacir Eid and Hussein Salameh – is restrained and intense, suggesting that Abu Nowar deserved his director’s prize.
Penned by Abu Nowar and Bassel Ghandour, the story is noteworthy on a number of levels. Formally it has an art house sparseness about it that, in execution, is filled with extended silences – spare in needless musical accompaniment as well as dialogue.
Thanks to the film’s often spectacular desert locations, Wolfgang Thaler’s cinematography fills these voids admirably.
Though the performance of Fox, who depicts the officer standing in for T.E. Lawrence, isn’t among the strongest in the film, the self-conscious references to Lean that his character represents are thematically satisfying – largely thanks to the officer’s longevity.
Jordanian film production is slight and much of the cinema that has emerged in the past decade has tended to read like ad copy for the Hashemite kingdom – which, since the 1958 Iraqi revolution, is the sole inheritor of the Arab Revolt, the Sharif of Mecca’s World War I collaboration with British imperialism.
Though set within the Great War, Abu Nowar and Ghandour’s story doesn’t focus on geopolitics. Instead it centers on a more intimate and nuanced relationship between Jacir’s Theeb, a little boy alone in the desert, and Mutlag’s wounded gunman.
A Bedouin himself, the gunman explains that he fell into a life of brigandage after the Hijaz Railway made his traditional trade as pilgrimage guide redundant.
In this respect “Theeb” owes as much to American Westerns as it does the history of the Hijaz. The murderer’s backstory also provides this film with a curious contemporaneity: Redundancy born of technological advance, and the criminality to which its survivors must sometimes resort, marks our lives now as much as then.
By Jim Quilty
