When Time Becomes a Woman (2012)

Directed by: Ahmad Alyaseer
Country: Jordan

Movie Review: Talky, minimal, and tiresome is what comes to my head when I first try to describe Jordanian film “When Time Becomes a Woman”, Ahmad Alyaseer’s directorial debut. The poor, stagey script only needs two actors and repetitive shots from the same landscape, to tell a weird and futuristic story about the end of the world. Zad is a confident, controller, and egocentric revolutionary who unintentionally was responsible for the destruction of the Earth in an operation called M16. In a remote place somewhere in the mountains, he tries to convince the last woman on the planet to go with him in order to save the world. The confusing dialogue becomes insufferable, in a mix of elaborated philosophy and mechanical questions and answers that seemed almost a hide-and-seek game that tries to confront fantasy and reality, knowledge and unawareness, trust and suspicion. He tells her about his past deeds in 2050’s when the Earth was invaded and a dangerous virus infected most of the inhabitants, while she keeps questioning about his methods, motives, and intentions. With a nauseating fatalist score accompanying all the extremely glossy images, “When Time Becomes a Woman” cannot be seen as a serious film (at least in my eyes), being a complete failure in all the genres that is categorized: drama, mystery, and sci-fi. Its 73 minutes were more than enough to running out my patience.