Blood, sand and oil in Arabia
Film
BLACK GOLD
Cert: 12A
***
A battle has finished and dead bodies litter the sand, rotting in the unforgiving sun. The victor, Sultan Nesib (Antonio Banderas) demands the sons of the loser, Sultan Amar (Mark Strong), as hostages. Amar agrees, as insurance against future war. Finally, both agree that the wasteland on which they are standing, known as The Yellow Belt, is to remain ownerless. Off rides Nesib – for whom Banderas seems to have kept his Spanish accent – with the boys.
Flash forward 15 years. Amar’s sons have grown up: Saleh the elder into a warrior-type who loves flying his hawk and the younger Auda (Tahar Rahim) into a bookish sweetie. One day, Texan Oil turns up and tells Nesib that he is about to become very, very rich. The bulk of the black gold, though, lies in a little patch of no-man’s land called…The Yellow Belt. When the devoutly religious, honour-bound Amar refuses to cooperate, insisting on honouring the agreement made 15 years ago, war becomes inevitable. Auda, now married to Nesib’s beautiful daughter Leila (Freida Pinto), must pick sides.
Of course, this not just a war between the sultans, but between mammon and God, sons and fathers, faith and infidelity. Old Arabia – with tribal loyalties, religiosity and cholera outbreaks – is pitted against the future, with its Americans, cash and cars. A lot of blood is shed. Two and a half hours’ worth, in fact. French director Jean-Jacques Annaud has tried to pull off an epic: a coming of age story about both a young man and a region. But attempting to show how the Gulf became awash in oil money alongside a love story, a father-son story and a tale of politics too was possibly a mistake, and it mostly becomes a film of noisy, seductively-shot battles. Yes, the landscape is compelling – filming took place in the deserts of Tunisia and Qatar during the Arab spring. But in the end, getting through Black Gold feels rather like stumbling across an endless sand dune.