Theeb (2014)

While watching Theeb, I couldn't help thinking of Lawrence of Arabia: the gleaming and dizzying images of the endlessness of the desert. Visually, Naji Abu Nowar's Theeb is a remarkable film. As for the story - I wasn't entirely convinced by this coming-of-age story about a Bedouin boy during WWI who goes out on a risky adventure in the desert. The central tension of the story is the young kid's enchantment with a British man who visits the camp he and his family live in. But this tension is soon lost: the film lapses into a rather conventional action mode where the viewer's attention is grabbed by an insistent will-he-survive. While the first few scenes of the film worked very well (establishing a form of life) the middle part about a boy growing into manhood crept forward rather predictably. However, one thing it did very well was to convey historical upheavals indirectly. There is the fall of the Ottoman empire, technical revolution and globalization, all of which figures in the film through the child's eyes. Even though Theeb has an interesting undercurrent - a pacifistic one even? - somehow, its presentation of innocence and struggle failed to engage me at depth. "The strong eat the weak" is delivered as a universal truth about what human life essentially is.