‘Raven Song’ Review: Saudi Arabia’s Oscar Entry From Director Mohamed Al Salman
14.12.2022 - 17:47
/ deadline.com
It’s 2002 and raining brains in Riyadh, at least from the gormless Nasser’s wonky perspective. Nasser’s doctor is firmly convinced he has a brain tumour, which is his explanation for the protracted hallucinations Nasser experiences and that he, Dr Ahmed, is all too ready to excise. Nasser isn’t so sure: his dreams, fantasies and visions are more fun than the rest of his life, yoked beneath the twin tyrannies of his fanatical father and his boss at the thinly patronized Dove Hotel. Why get rid of the good stuff? Especially once those visions start to include the mysterious young woman who arrived unannounced one day to ask for the key to room 227. She’s welcome to walk the corridors of his mind any old time.
Raven Song is Mohamed Al Salman’s debut feature and Saudi Arabia’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar, following its debut at the Red Sea Film Festival. Ambitious but awkward, it plods between surrealist excesses such as the brain shower, impromptu poetry recitals and lingering shots of Nasser’s baffled expression as he fails to negotiate any of his life’s travails. Asem Alawad plays Nasser as a desert version of the Little Tramp, all but crushed by authority and the pangs of love; when his irascible father screams at him that he is “a dumb goat,” there is a sneaking sense that he’s right.
The object of Nasser’s pangs is a young woman in a snow-white abaya and with an unlikely amount of hair on view (Kateryna Tkachenko) who comes to the hotel, asks to see room 227, opens the desk and leaves an envelope – inside what turns out to be book of poems- addressed to the occupant. Nasser is still mooning over her when an obstreperous family arrives and demands that the paterfamilias, an old man apparently
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