Sundance Film #6: Reves de Poussiere (Buried Dreams)

After traveling across the vast desert expanses of northeast Burkina Faso, Mocktar, a Nigerian peasant, arrives in a mining camp looking for work. Racked with grief from a past tragedy, he takes a job mining gold for the camp's unpitying boss. Carrying small hand picks, the miners crawl through dangerously narrow shafts leading hundreds of feet down, then haul bags of rock back up. Although Mocktar has clearly chosen to lose himself here, he befriends Coumba, a young widow raising her daughter. Like all the castaways, she also waits desperately for a nugget of gold and a better life.

The characters in Laurent Salgues' entrancing debut feature occupy both a literal and a figurative netherworld. Pulling amazing textures from the windswept wasteland, his widescreen images are hypnotic. But it's the camera's evocation of people that is most striking. Salgues is more interested in showing us inner landscapes - and the dignity of these souls that seem to erode before us. For the rest, it's cruel irony that they are so close to gold but so far from happiness.

In in amazingly stoic performance, Makena Diop conveys an entire journey of self-discovery. We have only a vague sense of Mocktar's wounds, but it's clear that riches will not salve them.
(John Nein, 2007 Sundance Film Festival catalog)
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I don't know what movie John Nein saw, but what I saw was punishing, depressing and mean. I have to say, the acting was fine, the cinematography was swell, it was technically a very competent film, but after the effervescent hope and love of The Pool, Buried Dreams was like waking up from a nightmare to find that you're still in prison and your cellmate hates you.

The characters in Buried Dreams are living not just in the desert of Africa, but in the moonscape of a gold mine where the shafts have been dug by the short-handled picks of countless men. Mocktar, the main character, comes into the camp as a man who doesn't drink, doesn't do drugs, and looks bewildered at the madness around him. But without any kind of acknowledgement, he slips into the same life as everyone else.

In Buried Dreams, everyone is after a fortune, but everyone who's made one has lost it. One man went home and was beset by "cousins" who moved in and spent all his money. One man gave all his money to his father who was then killed and the blame laid on him. One man had just gotten his fortune and was on his way to his hometown, but his body was found in the desert. It didn't matter what kind of person you were - nobody got ahead, nobody got any happier, there was no redemption or hope anywhere in sight.

We didn't stick around for the Q&A, but if we had, I'd be curious about what exactly Salgues was trying to say. The reviewer for the catalog obviously saw a great deal more in the film than I did, as did the person who introduced it. It feels to me like someone did a really good job of selling this to a committee somewhere. I can't count how many times I've written a piece and showed it to someone else, only to have them not get it because I'd left out key information.

If you have to explain it, it's just not a good movie.

The Pirate says: *groan* It's bleak. Depressing enough it could be Italian. Umberto D. in Africa, only not as upbeat.

My score: 3
The Pirate's score: 2