Bab'Aziz The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul
March 2009 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Director and writer Nacer Khemir is a Tunisian-born Muslim whose films aim to present the beauty and antiquity of his culture. Bab’Aziz completes his "desert trilogy": Wanderers of the Desert (1984) and The Dove’s Lost Necklace (1990) precede it. Khemir’s trilogy seeks to redress the image that fanatical terrorists have given to Islam. "If you are walking with your father, and your father falls flat with his face in the mud, what do you do? You pick him up and you try to wipe his face with your coat or your shirt. Me, I tried to wipe his face with a film." The film responds to what he calls the cultural rupture between Muslim generations and the threat of "an anthropological death." Bab’Aziz presents us ancient, mystical Islam -- Sufi -- with its principles of love, beauty, and austerity. Sufi, says Nacer Khemir, is "where the aesthetics and the spirit of Muslim culture found their best expression."

In the manner of a folk tale, Bab’Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul is the spiritual journey across the desert of a Sufi wise man, a blind old dervish. With his young granddaughter Ishtar, Bab’Aziz is on foot to a gathering of dervishes somewhere out there on the shapely, endless dunes, a meeting that happens only every 30 years. As the blind man and child travel, out of nowhere they encounter other travelers, every one with a story. Each story is enacted, and it provides the filmmaker with another opportunity to reveal something more about the beauty of Sufi: its calligraphy, textiles and architecture; its music, poetry, and twirling dervish dance.

The screenplay itself is constructed like a dervish story, in a spiral. The grandfather tells the child the story of the prince who gave up all to contemplate his soul in a reflecting pond. He is guarded in his trance only by a loyal old dervish. When the prince awakens at last, he finds not the dervish, but only the dervish’s suf, or wool robe, which he puts on and wanders off, to become a dervish himself. The grandfather’s journey ends with his burial in the sand by someone who dons his suf and wanders off. Was the old grandfather himself once the young prince in his story? The story spirals beyond its ending.

The cinematography by Mahmoud Kalari and the original music by Armand Amar are worth the price of the DVD. Here is stunning landscape and sound we poor westerners do not encounter. It is a mystery how such rich, rhythmic music emerged from so austere a setting. The desert scenes and towns were shot in Tunisia and Iran. There is a bleached, muted quality to the color, which may have been deliberate. The dialogue is in Arabic and Farsi with English subtitles that are adequate but in need of editing. There is a 32-minute extra called "Nacer Khemir’s Desert Trilogy" that is a very valuable accompaniment to the film. I wish I had watched it first. Nacer Khemir is seen walking through the landscape of the films while describing his intentions in making them. What he says about Sufi illuminates Bab’Aziz: He gives a personal, clear introduction to an ancient religious tradition he cherishes and whose loss he dreads.

If you sit down to Bab’Aziz unprepared or inattentive, you will see a disjointed story set in endless sand dunes. But there is so much more than that in this subtle and unconventional film. At a time when relations between the Arab world and the West need mending, it is a film to be seen and pondered.

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