It’s 2002 and raining brains in Riyadh, at least from the gormless Nasser’s wonky perspective. Nasser’s doctor is firmly convinced he has a brain tumour, which is his explanation for the protracted hallucinations Nasser experiences and that he, Dr Ahmed, is all too ready to excise. Nasser isn’t so sure: his dreams, fantasies and visions are more fun than the rest of his life, yoked beneath the twin tyrannies of his fanatical father and his boss at the thinly patronized Dove Hotel. Why get rid of the good stuff? Especially once those visions start to include the mysterious young woman who arrived unannounced one day to ask for the key to room 227. She’s welcome to walk the corridors of his mind any old time.

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Raven Song is Mohamed Al Salman’s debut feature and Saudi Arabia’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar, following its debut at the Red Sea Film Festival. Ambitious but awkward, it plods between surrealist excesses such as the brain shower, impromptu poetry recitals and lingering shots of Nasser’s baffled expression as he fails to negotiate any of his life’s travails. Asem Alawad plays Nasser as a desert version of the Little Tramp, all but crushed by authority and the pangs of love; when his irascible father screams at him that he is “a dumb goat,” there is a sneaking sense that he’s right. 

The object of Nasser’s pangs is a young woman in a snow-white abaya and with an unlikely amount of hair on view (Kateryna Tkachenko) who comes to the hotel, asks to see room 227, opens the desk and leaves an envelope –  inside what turns out to be book of poems- addressed to the occupant. Nasser is still mooning over her when an obstreperous family arrives and demands that the paterfamilias, an old man apparently reeling with exhaustion, be put up in the same room. Once duly housed, he refuses to come out.

Meanwhile, Nasser’s friend Abu Sagr (Ibrahim Khairallah) persuades him that the way to win his fair lady is with a poem that he will deliver as a song; it’s true that he had given up singing, he says, “and repented for a while as a change,” but he’s ready for a return to showbiz. To that end, he dubs Nasser “the Raven” as a pen-name and strong-arms a journalist into writing a story about his poetic powers, which are yet to be truly tested by actual writing. Fame is what matters. 

For a film full of static shots that often feels deliberately slow, Raven Song is alarmingly thickly plotted. On we go. A tow-truck driver by trade, wheeler-dealer Abu Sagr seems to have his fingers in a lot of pies. Not long after the journalist’s article is printed, Nasser the Raven finds himself being bundled into  the back of a windowless van set up as a clubroom with a group of poetry enthusiasts, being asked to choose sides in a debate between modernists and traditionalists morally opposed to blank verse. They drive around, arguing fiercely, until they get hit by a van full of goats. Honestly, you can’t go anywhere without bumping into a goat.

Deranged as this sounds, it is reportedly grounded in Saudi reality. Around the turn of this century, Saudi poets and critics battled in the columns of Riyadh’s newspapers over the correct approach to meter and rhyme, pitching the conservative classicists against the free-form liberals in what was essentially a displaced political conflict. This phenomenon was apparently the director’s initial inspiration. 

Foreign audiences are unlikely to have a grip on that bit of cultural history – and the selection for the Oscar race means there probably will be foreign festival audiences – but that isn’t Mohamed al Salman’s issue.  In interviews at the Red Sea festival, he said that he is interested in making films that reflect his own culture and speak to Saudi audiences at a time when the nascent film industry is a popular source of pride.   

What this admirably uncompromising stance means is that while nothing in Raven Song is entirely beyond an outsider’s understanding, there is plenty that jars, from the sheer weirdness of the van full of poets down to the abrasive way his utterly unsympathetic characters talk to each other that may – or may not – register as comic to local audiences. A culminating scene of brutality smashes the whimsical romcom tone of what has come before to bits, much as Nasser’s father does when he destroys his son’s Arabic music tape with a mallet.  Why does he do that? I don’t know. Perhaps, for someone like me, that’s the real point.

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