MIFF Session 4: THE UNKNOWN SAINT

A bank robber buries his loot and makes it look like a grave. When he gets out he finds that a mausoleum has been built around the grave as a shrine to the unknown saint. An aging man attempts to pray for rain in the barren landscape. A new doctor takes up his position in the village and is faced with a life crushing boredom. The villagers hang around the barbershop and the dispensary because where else. The mausoleum guard, one of the few responsible office holders in the area, takes his job very seriously. The bank robber, musing, calls in some help. What could go wrong?

This fable of wishes, faith and futility is kept very deliberately pedestrian as the tension felt by the characters must be kept under the surface. The spectre of religion is centre screen but handled without mockery; characters who turn to it are desperate rather than deluded. This film is more about coping with difficult hands of cards and turning to imagination and inventiveness in a barren world of rocks, dust and misguided worship.

The vistas of unending dunes and distant mountains, of cloudbanks that seem to be for someone else, nurture the gentle play of people who are content with their plain means having known no other kind. SOme hard thinking has gone into the world building here, even though it's familiar to anyone who has an idea of the lunar landscape of North Africa; it's wide open but constrained. A deceptively plain story told with great delicacy.