It should come as no surprise that the exploitation of Africa by western entities extended to the continent’s literature. That should be the subtext of the Nordin Lasfar documentary Mohammed & Paul – Once Upon a Time in Tangier except that the brown and white men behind those eponymous names are far too complex for black and white readings. Knowingly or not, Lasfar shows us that these men were both talented and terrible.
Mohammed Mrabet and Paul Bowles met by a beach in Tangier and began a relationship of ups and downs until Bowles death. Lasfar doesn’t say explicitly if there was a sexual affair between them but given Bowles’ bisexuality and Mrabet’s gift for fabulism, who’s to say?
The time and place certainly encouraged wanton behaviour. As did the expat literary community, which included Tennessee Williams, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. “Those terrible Beat writers”, as one interviewee calls them.
But Lasfar has eyes only for Mrabet and Bowles. The American writer is impressed by the former’s storytelling ability but knows there is no real commercial appeal for something that is merely recited to whoever is willing to listen.
There’s no real suspense as to how the story is going to develop. Within the first 20 minutes, it is already obvious that a subplot of exploitation will turn up. And it certainly does.
Bowles soon begins to translate Mrabet’s stories, turning them into books that can be sold. The books appear to have done reasonably well but Mrabet says he never got royalties, and he may not have gotten anything if Bowles wasn’t nudged. In the end, he received 2800 dollars. Not exactly a terrible sum back in the day.
Mrabet was not a saint either. He stole from Bowles, who seemed to have treated his thieving as something more or less normal. It is hard to tell if his not making a fuss over the theft was because he was old and frail, or felt guilty, or as compensation for the younger man’s company. His companions from that time, a handful of whom speak to Lasfar, appear still aghast at the theft and Bowles’ resignation.
That disapproval of Mrabet’s actions leads to some of the film’s tastiest lines in a documentary that’s rather bland. One person refers to Moroccan culture as one that encourages deceit, another person backs it up. Bowles himself wasn’t too fond of the locals, even if he said it was possible to “like them en masse and approve of their existence”. A publisher of Bowles’ translations is asked if he considered dealing directly with Mrabet but he doesn’t seem to have given that a thought; he considered the illiterate author a troublemaker. He also adds that Moroccan Arab culture has “a lack of empathy”.
Lasfar leaves all of us this in and doesn’t add any sort of commentary, which is a relief. But there is a chance for a combustible documentary that we never see. In any case, the men behind those words are of an earlier era, but their plainspoken nature is refreshing. They feel no need to demonstrate their goodness by posturing.
Their words do not elevate the documentary to must-watch territory but it might provide a certain type of viewer some satisfaction to see people say exactly what they are thinking. Educational entities will find Mohammed & Paul useful, especially if Bowles’s 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky is somewhere in the curriculum. For everybody else, maybe read that novel? And then maybe see the documentary.
Director: Nordin Lasfar
Producer: Jos de Putter for dieptescherpte
Cinematography: Jean Counet, Jackó van ‘t Hof, Aziz Al-Dilaimi
Editing: Thomas Vroege
Sound: Benny Jansen
Sound Design: Alex Booij
Music: Vincent Van Warmerdam
Distribution (Netherlands): Rieks Hadders for Mokum Filmdistributie
