Here is a challenging, cerebral slow-burner from the artist and film-maker Ben Rivers. It unfolds calmly, blankly, then contorts into violence: part drama, part opaque essay film on the nature of orientalism. This is a free adaptation of Paul Bowles’s 1945 short story A Distant Episode; there are also echoes of Lawrence and Kipling. The title is the strange babble that Bowles once overheard on the lips of a stranger, and this occult outburst reportedly inspired the writer’s disturbing tale about a European professor of languages who comes to Morocco intent on studying dialect, behaves high-handedly with the locals and is treated with terrifying violence that is far from justified or explained by his own behaviour. Rivers’s film changes the man from a professor to a film-maker, who autocratically insists the locals take roles in his movie. He makes one do a terrifying and dangerous stunt, falling backwards from a height on to cardboard boxes, perhaps an allusion to the “camel-udder boxes” that the professor wants to buy in Bowles’s story. It results in a bizarre brutality. Maybe nothing in the film can live up to the superb, surreal menace of its title, but it’s a very shrewd commentary on Bowles’s story.
