Chicago Tribune
Reviewed by: Sid Smith

“Bab’Aziz (The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul)” is a spare but haunting movie extolling ancient faith via stark visual imagery, mythic fable and allegory.

The framing tale is straightforward and strikingly simple. Bab’Aziz (Parviz Shahinkhou), an aged, blind dervish, and his young granddaughter (Maryam Hamid) are on a pilgrimage on foot across a barren desert to join a religious assemblage that comes together every 30 years. To pass the time, and continue his role as her spiritual teacher, he tells her a parable about a worldly prince who one day followed a graceful gazelle and abandoned his throne to stare into a pool of water, seemingly in perpetuity.

The telling of the parable occurs in recurrent snippets throughout the journey of the pair, who meet up with various other characters along the way. Their stories become part of the narrative, and they include a hot-tempered, disheveled young man out to avenge his brother’s murder, a man who claims he dove into a well and found a palace and true love on the other side, and a poet hunting for a religious woman he loves.

Tunisian director Nacer Khemir’s picaresque structure and fabulist content are not the only reminders of Western tradition. The inclusion of the dreamlike and surreal recalls Federico Fellini, which is no surprise, because the screenplay by the director is said to include “participation by” Fellini scenarist Tonino Guerra (”Ginger and Fred”).

The movie’s strengths include cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari’s breathtaking but stern ode to desert imagery and composer Armand Amar’s plaintive score. Khemir’s approach to explicating Sufi religious tradition is understated and carefully tied to his characters and incidents, so that the philosophical gleanings are lean and nicely integrated into the story. This is spiritual filmmaking distilled enough to appeal to believers of all stripes and agnostics too. One exquisite mini-parable about three butterflies hovering around a flame is a searing exposition of human love. The cycle of youth and age and the trope of a journey come together inevitably, maybe predictably, but not without sparks of wisdom.

Bab’Aziz himself reveals the central theme of this serene, thought-inducing endeavor. “Everyone in this world,” he says, “has a great task to fulfill.”