‘Silent Storms’: Marrakech Review

Dir. Dania Reymond-Boughenou. Belgium/France. 2024. 85 minutes

Viewers could not fairly know the place they’re as soon as the mud has cleared in Silent Storms, which follows a journalist monitoring mysterious sandstorms round Algiers. This dense, typically complicated debut from French-Algerian writer-director Dania Reymond-Boughenou is an formidable, completed and serious-minded try to deal with grief, political reconciliation and the legacy of battle in a method that fuses the true and the implausible, the languages of political thriller, ghost story and eco-disaster spectacle – all on a tightly managed art-cinema scale.

The narrative coherence is typically as murky as the town’s skies

Tautly acted, this Marrakech competitors title ought to create modest business ripples – boosted by the business profile of actor and singing star Camélia Jordana – however will definitely convey auteur cachet to its up-and-coming director. 

With dialogue in Arabic and French, the movie is ready at present in what opening captions inform us is a metropolis on the shores of an unknown sea – however the locale is evidently Algeria, and the allusions are to the turbulence of that nation’s civil conflict of the Nineties. Its protagonist, initially no less than, is Nacer (Khaled Benaissa), a middle-aged newspaper journalist who has lengthy mourned his spouse Fajar (Jordana), shot lifeless by militia. He’s first seen quizzing a former militant, ostensibly for analysis, however it shortly emerges that he has extra private motivations. Later, although, Nacer drops in at his beleaguered newspaper and tries to curiosity the editor within the case of an odd yellow mud that’s blowing into the neighborhood. 

That isn’t the one puzzling phenomenon brewing: there are reported sightings of the lifeless returning to life. And finally, who ought to flip up in a cab however Fajar herself, supposedly again from a visit to Canada and puzzled by Nacer’s anxious response. That is a kind of uncommon movies during which Lazarus-like resurrection is expressly positioned in an incongruous context of on a regular basis normality – as in Robin Campillo’s 2004 debut They Got here Again – and earlier than lengthy, Fajar has launched into a brand new profession as an property agent.

In the meantime, Nacer’s physician brother Yacine (Mehdi Ramdani), traumatised by the demise of a affected person, makes a reference to a younger lady, Sharazade (Shirine Boutella), who takes him for a cathartic evening out at a subterranean artists’ hangout – vivid, however in any other case one thing of a distracting digression. Throughout all this, unusual clouds roll in, presaging a spectacularly staged climax during which this moody, fantastically-tinged piece of city realism goes full-scale apocalyptic.

There are apparent issues with Silent Storms (to not be confused with 2014 UK drama The Silent Storm; the unique French title means merely ‘The Storms’). One is that it so dramatically finally ends up not because it initially appears, with out the suitable narrative build-up doesn’t to information us. And there are too many strands, subsidiary characters, enigmatic asides (together with unusual poetic monologues) and adjustments of focus (at totally different occasions, we comply with all 4 primary characters, typically with their very own voice-overs).

The narrative coherence is typically as murky as the town’s skies. But Reymond-Boughenou and her co-writers and editors deserve applause for squeezing this advanced mass of incident right into a persistently gripping 85 minutes – and the concluding sandstorm is dealt with with a flourish as poetic as it’s spectacular. (Whereas this Belgian-French manufacturing could be very a lot an Algerian drama, it additionally resonates with a present French development for the apocalyptic, in movies as different as Acid, Vincent Should Die and Salem.)           

A robust forged supplies connecting threads by way of the literal and metaphoric murkiness, notably a saturnine, downbeat Benaissa, with Jordana, finest identified on display screen for Emmanuel Mouret’s 2020 Love Affair(s),  a compellingly enigmatic presence though we by no means fairly get to know her Fajar as a dwelling particular person – which can, in fact, be the purpose. DoP Augustin Barbaroux (latest Venice title And Their Kids After Them) additionally makes a virtuoso effort, particularly within the chiaroscuro evening sequences and within the dense yellow atmospherics of the ultimate act.