Directed by Augusta Palmer
At Anthology Film Archives, Nov. 13-19
The Hand of Fatima fits squarely into the ever-expanding genre of films documenting a director’s journey into his or her familial past. The public recording of what, in theory, is an intensely private experience, these filmmakers must create enough emotional legibility for the outside viewer to connect with their subjective state, while maintaining that intensely personal quality that brings their film the sheen of authenticity. Play too much to the viewer, and they don’t buy the singularity of the filmmaker’s experience. Keep it too close to the chest, and the film becomes little more than a diary found on the street: conveying the idea of intimacy without providing the context that makes such individual reflections resonate beyond the first-person singular.
Augusta Palmer’s account of her fraught relationship with Robert Palmer, the famed rock critic and musician who was also her father, emanates a sincerity of purpose that’s difficult to critique. For all its earnestness, however, The Hand of Fatima feels a little too thematically diffuse to leave a distinct impression. We may follow along with Palmer on her trip to the Moroccan village of Jajouka, but how this journey alters her conception of her father, herself, or the entrancing local musicians that drew both father and daughter to this far-flung locale remains theoretically clear but at an emotional remove.
Popularized by Brian Jones’ trip to play with the village’s musicians in 1974, Jajouka became both holy-grail and homeland to Robert Palmer throughout the 1970s and '80s. He first traveled there on assignment for Rolling Stone, where he enthusiastically wrote of the almost otherworldly power that the indigenous music and rituals had upon him. Returning throughout the rest of his life, Palmer found spiritual sustenance in Jajouka, as well as a benevolent father figure in Jnuin, the village leader, who eventually accepted Robert as a member of the musical brotherhood.
Having established a delicate if limited relationship with Robert before his death in 1997, Augusta traveled to Jajouka in 2006 with both her young daughter and her father’s third wife (with whom she felt a special connection), hoping to understand his adopted spiritual mecca and, by extension, Robert himself. She eventually meets Jnuin’s son, Bachir Attar, and discovers more about her father’s time in Jajouka and the current state of the musical art form practiced in the village.
The music of Jajouka has an undeniably hypnotic pull, and Palmer lingers upon its history and practice when she travels to Morocco. It’s all interesting to a point, but The Hand of Fatima has trouble connecting the music to the man that purportedly lies at the film’s center. We understand Robert Palmer’s bond to Jajouka intellectually—fed by his earlier passion for American blues music and the filling of the paternal void left by his own taciturn father—without feeling it viscerally, an issue oddly exacerbated by Palmer’s decision to portray many of her father’s experiences via fun but distancing animated sequences. This proves especially disappointing given Palmer’s often clear-eyed account of her father’s life as a whole, which was marked by crippling drug addiction and fraught personal relationships as well as professional triumphs.
The same disconnect can be seen when Palmer attempts to communicate her own epiphanies while in Jajouka. It’s hard not to be moved by images of Augusta hugging her stepmother, tears streaming down her face, as they listen to the Master Musicians of Jajouka play the same music that so inspired her father. Too often, though, Palmer underlines connections between herself, her father, and Jajouka through voiceover: thoughtful and elegant in its own right, but often feeling like an inadequate substitute for eloquent visuals. If The Hand of Fatima’s on-the-fly aesthetic is perhaps unavoidable given the shooting circumstances, it also precludes the kind of assured poetic imagery that may have conveyed Palmer’s thematic links with greater subtlety and effectiveness.
In the end, it’s difficult to dislike a film like The Hand of Fatima, particularly when the experience of creating it seems to have done therapeutic wonders for its maker. It makes me wish I had been able to experience those breakthroughs along with Palmer, rather than watching them occur from a distance.
