Yesterday I snuck out in the afternoon to see a documentary called Desert Wind, an unintentional comic masterpiece.
Have you heard the one about the Belgian the Frenchman and the Canadian in the Desert?
The plot of Desert Wind involves following 13 unlucky Frenchmen, Belgians, Canadians and Swiss as they traipse aimlessly around the Sahara Desert with their sickly looking Swiss therapist. It is presumably set outside and in the desert, since watching paint dry or grass grow would provide pretty stiff competition if you took the film seriously.
For starters, the presence of the sickly man begs the question, wouldn’t a real guide rather than a metaphorical one be a less risky choice in the middle of nowhere, with no paddle? In the background are a bunch of bemused Berbers who serve as real guides but only get cameo roles on account of their lack of psychology degrees.
The film opens with hackneyed symbolism, the magnificent 13 writing something that they want to give up on a piece of paper and throwing it into a fire. This all goes to dull plan until the French chef (even the people are cliches) decides that he is going to burn his clothing. At this point, someone in the movie audience audibly laughed – before getting abruptly shushed (it is possibly against the law to make fun of therapy, in New York).
What follows is a bunch of mediocre desert travelogue, interspersed with grown men complaining about their mothers. As they open up more and more, we seem to learn less and less about their characters and personalities. By showing the endpoint of dialog, often accompanied by shots of people weeping, the film ignores the subtlety of less dramatic details, and in doing so erases any context or depth.
After bouts of desert Sumo wrestling and Kendo with duct taped staves, the sickly therapist who has been watching too many Kung Fu movies, encourages the Chef to open up and let go of his emotions. After 2 minutes of vacant grinning, the chef’s face begins to contort – we don’t know if he is laughing or crying, and by this stage in the film, we know the feeling. When the chef finally collapses his quantum emotional state into floods of tears the sickly therapist continues to ask him to open up. The only avenue open to the chef now is to turn a genuine emotional reaction into a fake one. To satisfy the therapist he produces a truly weird but utterly insincere primal screamy type thing. The sickly man is proud of his patient’s progress.
By this stage, if it weren’t for the fact that I’m a certified, foaming at the mouth, atheist I’d be clamoring to join the religion of the Berber guides, rather than this self indulgent secular bullshit.
Towards the end of the film, the self parody reaches a triumphant zenith, as the unlucky 13 are told to take their clothes off and describe their relationships with their bodies. The sickly therapist does not lead by example. The camera inches slowly down the first victim’s torso – oh no, they can’t be – they are actually going to gaze in their navels. Alas, they only talk about their dicks, what a let down.
The last scene has each hapless victim stand on the edge of an escarpment and shout a promise into their audience of nobody. Its a bit like a Bon Jovi pop promo i once saw, except without the swirling helicopter shots that a decent budget buys you, or the screams of adoring fans, just empty, desert silence. Then comes the voice over.
My high school teacher told me that the worst thing you can do to end a story is say it was all a dream. That is, in fact, the second worst way to end a story.
Desert wind ends with ‘Their journey is over, but the real journey is just beginning’.
How true! Mine was a two stop subway ride, back downtown.