By B. Ruby Rich

FOR COMIC- strip artists, ideas take the form of lightbulbs popping into view over their characters' heads. While Waiting for Happiness is not a cartoon, nor even a comedy, it does offer up some serious punch lines on the meaning of life. And if a cartoon character's lightbulb symbolizes a sort of "Eureka!" moment of the mind, then surely Mauretanian director Abderrahmane Sissako has constructed Waiting as a series of such "Eureka!" moments, this time of the soul.

In the film's sleepy port town, a bulb, however symbolic, is also very much material: the old man who's one of the film's central characters makes his living by hooking up the power, so to speak, in this tiny town; accompanied by the orphaned boy who's his apprentice, he travels by foot from house to house with the magical wire that brings light. Yes, there are plenty of actual lightbulbs on-screen. They go on; they go off. Sometimes as requested; sometimes not. But if the light is material, it's also certainly symbolic: of knowledge, progress, illusion, and life itself.

Mauretania is a country on the western coast of Africa that became independent from French West Africa in 1960, that moment when the continent emerged from colonial shackles into ... what? That, partly, is the question. Born in Mauretania, raised in Mali, educated in film in Moscow, Sissako brings a sort of affectionately distanced intimacy to his view of the place. Furthermore, he sets the film in a coastal town, Nouadhibou, to underline the sense of people suspended between locations and eras, neither entirely here nor there, wherever "here" or "there" might be.

In addition to the churlish old man and the exuberant boy who adores him, there's a cast of other characters: the mother who is slowly teaching her daughter the traditional songs, to the off tune of a very basic guitar and with a snaillike pace of improvement, for instance, and the Asian gentleman, whose presence is never explained as he courts a local woman by performing very enthusiastic karaoke (really).

There's even a character that may well be a stand-in for the director himself: a young man already citified who returns to visit his mother but finds he can no longer understand the language (Hassaniya) spoken there. His solution? To watch. To become the voyeur we always are in the movie theater. To learn affection for these characters. To watch closely, with love, until it's time to leave. To depart, changed forever by the experience. Not a bad analogue at all to moviemaking and movie-watching. Until the body washes up on the shore, and the desert sends its sands blowing over another body, and the lightbulb turns itself on for the last time.

Waiting for Happiness is a film bound to take your breath away and deposit you back on the 16th Street sidewalk changed irrevocably or at least – hey, I'm a realist – for a few hours. A heart-stopping chronicle of life and death in a small town at the end of the road and the start of the sea, it's a lyrical ode by a natural poet whose every cadence is a cinematic one.

Comparisons have already been made to Claire Denis and Beau Travail: fine, if you loved it, but if not, subtract the Melville and start over. Besides, how can Sissako be like Denis if he's so much like Tsai Ming-liang? Like Tsai, Sissako has a severe precision to his compositions, an inevitability to the film frame on-screen, a wit that pleases, and a love for his characters so sharp it hurts. Sissako's eye and heart are linked in the service of beauty.

A word, now, on pacing: yes, the film strolls by with the absence of haste that can sometimes make African cinema feel like rough going for the postindustrial brain juiced on fast cutting and lazy viewing; no, there's not a millisecond of boredom. Think of time in this particular film as a rubber band: Sissako stretches it out oh so carefully, but if you don't pay attention, it will snap back in your face.