Morocco

THE UNKNOWN SAINT: a shrine to really bad luck

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Photo caption: THE UNKNOWN SAINT. Photo courtesy of The Match Factory.

Here’s the premise of the crime comedy The Unknown Saint: a thief is being hunted down in the vast Moroccan desert. Just before capture, he buries his loot on a sandy hilltop and disguises it to look like a grave. After serving time in prison, he returns to dig up his loot. But he finds that some people, believing the “grave” to be that of a saint, have built a mausoleum over the grave. Even worse, an entire village has sprung up to support pilgrimage commerce, and the shrine is guarded around the clock.

The thief (Younes Bouab) starts plotting to sneak in and dig up the loot, but he’s got to overcome, among other obstacles, the night watchman’s canine corps. It doesn’t help when he brings in an accomplice so stupid that he doesn’t get that his prison nickname of “Ahmed the Brain” is ironic. And he is surprised when he is not the only nighttime tomb raider.

The thief has to wait in a village filled with eccentrics and small timers on the hustle. The dispensary has a bored young doctor, an aged nurse with a wicked sense of humor, and a waiting room full of “patients” putting on a charade of medical need.

Younes Bouab in THE UNKNOWN SAINT. Photo courtesy of The Match Factory.

The Unknown Saint is relentlessly deadpan, as all the characters plunge ahead with profound cynicism or earnest absurdity, with at least one critic likening it to Fargo. It’s all very, very funny, especially an unexpected triumph of dog dentistry involving the town barber.

The Unknown Saint is the first feature for writer-director Alaa Eddine Aljem, and it is an auspicious debut. Aljem knows how to use the vastness of the desert to express human futility and how to wring laughs out of human foibles.

The Unknown Saint is Morocco’s submission for this year’s Best International Feature Oscar. The Unknown Saint is streaming from Netflix.

HIER: riddle, mystery, enigma, brilliant

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Vlad Ivanov (left) in HIER

In the brilliant and original drama Hier, middle-aged Victor Ganz has built a successful global engineering enterprise.  He takes what he thinks is a quick trip to Morocco to quell an apparent hiccup in one of his construction projects.  But when he arrives, he finds that the problem with his project doesn’t exist after all, but a mysterious stranger appears and threatens him about something else altogether.  Decades before, Victor had worked in Morocco as an adventuresome young man; incomplete memories of that experience are revived and begin to obsess him.  He becomes a detective but doesn’t fully understand what he is looking for in his own past.

Soon Victor is immersed in puzzling déjà vu.  Is he going crazy?  Is he imagining something in his past or his present?  Who is the woman he is driven to find again?  And why does Victor keep getting beaten up like a human piñata?

Referring to Russian unpredictability, Winston Churchill said, ” It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”  He might have just watched Hier. as Victor’s confusion becomes ever more trippy.

Ganz is played by Romanian actor Vlad Ivanov in a tour de force.  As Ivanov ‘s Victor is more and more consumed by the puzzles,  he becomes increasingly perplexed, dogged, battered and exhausted.

Ivanov is best known for the Romanian masterpiece 4 Days, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, in which he played one of cinema’s most repellent characters, Mr. Bebe, the sexually harrassing abortionist. American audiences have also seen Ivanov’s performances in Police, Adjective and Snowpiercer.

This is a Hungarian film, but it takes place in Morocco, Some of the dialogue is in English, most is in subtitled French, with some in unsubtitled Arabic (because the protagonist is not fluent in Arabic).

The film’s original Hungarian title is Tegnap, the word for “Yesterday”; the international title is the French word for “yesterday”, Hier (a marketing mistake IMO).  Of course, the protagonist’s obsession is an episode in the past – yesterday – that he remembers and understands only in fragments.

Hier is an impressive first feature for writer-director Bálint Kenyeres. Cinequest hosts the North American premiere of Hier, which is one of the world cinema highlights of the festival.