08/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: In Tunisian director Mohamed Ben Attia’s mysterious and suggestive new film, you’ll believe a dad can fly

Behind the Mountains [+see also:
trailer
interview: Mohamed Ben Attia
film profile] feels like the culmination of an informal trilogy from Mohamed Ben Attia, which you might say commenced with Hedi [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], an award winner at Berlin 2016, and Dear Son [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mohamed Ben Attia
film profile], which premiered in the 2018 edition of the Directors’ Fortnight. In cinemas, and perhaps even festival exhibitions, that might well be the most appropriate manner to screen them. Set squarely amidst present-day, contemporary Tunisian life, and taking place over a compressed timespan, they’re able to strongly express the features and fault lines of the North African country to outsiders, always eschewing heavy-handed didacticism.

This feature, which premiered in the middle of Venice’s Orizzonti line-up, is the most unconventional, and arguably the most rewarding, although its power and sense of logic build belatedly, following an (intentionally?) unsteady start. There’s a sense of “automatic writing” to it, where images deriving from Ben Attia’s subconscious have bubbled up, arranging themselves in suggestive patterns. It also seems to meditate on the conventions of the austere European art cinema of the 2000s, rather than of the past several years: there’s a tense, elongated home invasion, and elsewhere, a guy decides to just take off and fly, magically suspended on top of the swerving landscape like an early Bruno Dumont protagonist.

The current tensions in Tunisian society, of the entropic aftermath of the Arab Spring, and of the always ominous potential for religious extremism, certainly spur the plot. Shown in elliptically cut sequences, with sudden smashes to black, Rafik (Majd Mastoura) goes on a random, psychotic spree of vandalism at what seems like his former workplace, a modern-looking, open-plan office. He is then incarcerated for four years (during which he attempts suicide, flinging himself dramatically out of a top-floor window during a communal mealtime), after which he returns to Tunis to abduct his bright son Yassine (Walid Bouchhioua), who’s been raised by his now-single mother and his paternal grandparents. He flees from the city, towards a gorgeously photographed mountain range on its outskirts, where he demonstrates what appears to be his gift for acrobatic flying – it really makes the story more interesting if this is actually happening, rather than offering another exploration of subjective perception.

Together with a shepherd (Samer Bisharat) – to make things that bit more earthy – who also abandons his abundant flock of sheep to join forces with this “prophet”, these car passengers streaming down the valley tarmac look a bit like a surrogate family, replete with two fathers. Looking for further shelter, their next stage is to take hostage a nice upper-middle-class “nuclear” family, living in a big house in these parts, composed of parents Najwa (Selma Zghidi) and Wejdi (Helmi Dridi), and in an obvious piece of screenwriting “mirroring”, their also-precocious son Oussama (Wissem Belgharak). A long, tense chamber drama ensues, opening as somewhat generic, but which then develops a meditative sense of pacing.

The feel of a folktale – or a parable of instruction told maybe by a religious educator – emerges, bursting like a butterfly out of peril-stricken plot beats straight from Haneke or Reygadas. Conveyed gently and deftly, the sense of a country on a precipice, harbouring all sorts of bad and vital energies, is incontestable.

Behind the Mountains is a production by Tunisia, Belgium, France, Italy, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, staged by Nomadis Images, Les Films du Fleuve, Tanit Films and 010 FILMS. Its world sales are handled by Luxbox.