Comment

Sep 18, 2017
We recognize the genre immediately: the early 1900’s; a beautifully photographed desert landscape; a lawless place on the edge of civilization; a stranger rides into town; a shoot-out against bandits in a canyon – yet the “cowboys” are dressed in Bedouin robes and they’re riding camels, and the desert has brown and beige hues rather than reddish. The American “Western” has been here successfully transported to the wild parts of Arabia and Egypt. (Of course the American Western has another alter-ego in another semi-mythical part of the world too; the Japanese samurai film; though in "Theeb" the Western trope is used not as a nostalgic look back on an earlier time, but as a biting critique of the coming of "civilization".) I won’t give away any of the plot, except that Theeb is a boy who learns about a bad world; there’s good (the tribal society) vs. evil (“civilization”), a couple of surprise twists, lots of artsy foreshadowing, and stunning photography. Fans of Hollywood storytelling may find it looks a little too “indie”, but to me this roughness adds to the roughness of the storyline. The unseen, mocking voices in the canyon are genuinely frightening, as is the acting of the bandit who shows up later with uncertain intentions. The foreshadowing of the boy tracing the cracks in the parched mud is also an interesting moment. Worth watching if only to see how a familiar type of movie can be made unfamiliar. A side note: To my ears, there seems to be some confusion about the name. The Arabic pronunciations alternate between “Thaybe”, “Taybe”, and “Teb” with a drawn-out E. I’m guessing that I’m hearing a vowel sound halfway between the long A and the short E, and a TH as a variant of a type of T. These sounds occur frequently in the world’s languages, and I speak no Arabic so I don’t know how they work in that language.