Kino Bambino

From The Star And Shadow Cinema Wiki

Marakech Inshallah (Pierce Brothers, USA, 2007) and Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass, USA, 2007).

Opening sequence of Marakech INshallah is a boy, slow-motion in black and white super 8, running down through ruins. Close up of boy's eye signifies the direction of our identification. The story is told from his perspective - a young, rural boy who adores his lazy and wayward older brother. The older of the two disappears to try his luck in the big city - Marrakech. The younger, upon receiving a post card with limited news, decides to set out and find him, running into his own set of troubles.

This film was shot in 1989 - a fact that goes unnoticed until towards the end, when some white tourists appear dressed in decidedly 80's clothing. Does this suggest our ideal imaginary of a poor developing African country is satisfied until that point - I didn't consider time as a factor until then. It is quite possible that Marakech has not changed dramatically. However the Tangiers in Bourne Ultimatum, (which we watched on the ferry over to Amsterdam, perfeclty pissed on vodka and old fashioned lemonade) is a clash between chaotic, narrow and crowded market alleys and European style cafes with European style people sipping cafes, answering Beckham endorsed mobiles before zipping off on Italian scooters. Here the cliche of Morrocco that resides in the Western sub-conscious is matched by the technologically developed environments navigated by mobile phone tracking device and the jazzy scooter favored by Brits in mediterranean tourist traps - a perfect blend. Bourne's foe is no longer the crazed, erratic enemy of the old Arab warrior, but is now the new, premiership footballer lookalike - a less negative sterotype? The power relationship is naturally one sided, as Bourne represents his country victoriously in the conquest of the Muslim on his own turf. In Marrakech Inshallah, the film makes a point of attempting to show the 'true' sides of Morroccan life, slightly distant through the mediation of the child's voiceover. Like Kiarostami's approach, characters are portrayed as inherently kind and benevolent, with some compromising weaknesses! Perhaps flawed fools is a way to describe them. This characterisation naturally goes far deeper than Bourne's, which uses X-Files tricks and flashbacks to build up a motivation for Bourne's counter-espionage. Obviosuly Bourne Ultimatum has a single goal - to thrill. However to do that one needs to rely on genre tropes, stereotypes or variants with enough similarity to become stereotypes through the movie, like the female CIA agent who takes control of the manhunt, and unpicking these stereotypes tends to lead to negative results - even a powerful woman who has made it to the top of her career cannot resist the temptation of helping out the hunky Jason Bourne. Marrakech Inshallah takes every anxiety felt by a white, educated, good-intentioned anthropological filmmaker and tries to incorporate it into the film. We have frequent close ups of the boy's eye, in an attempt to endow him with a gaze as powerful as that of the Western tourist, fascinated and horrified by underdevelopment, but perhaps less conscious of their history's implication in that underdevelopment. In an unusual sequence at the end of the film, the filmmaker himself appears as a character making a documentary, who wants to pay the older brother to answer some questions relating to the current situation in Morrocco, in fornt of a camera. I expected this set-up to be a moment when the older boy's voice (well, the director's voice delivered through the boy) would be heard in a didactic explanation of why Marrakech is under-developed, how the agencies of the West or North are to blame (IMF, World Bank, Multinationals), and why he is therefore listless and un-motivated, and why the city seems full of petty criminals, pickpockets and hustlers. Instead, the boy reacts to a question about his family, and takes the video camera away to make up for the offence. This attempt at giving over the control fo the film production to the 'other' that these filmmakers are trying to represent feels heartfelt, but ultimately patronising and tokenistic.