A woman stumbles through the desert, parched, without a voice and apparently without memory. A shepherd finds her, ties her behind his cart with a rope and drags her home. There he lives with another shepherd, probably his brother. The woman becomes their property. She is given clothes and a cooking pot. But the balance is disrupted. When the elder and strongest of the two men demands the woman for himself, unintendedly she drives a wedge between the two men. She becomes a burden and they put her back in the desert. But the shepherds are the woman’s only chance of survival, so she comes back. They can’t get rid of her. And nor do they really want to. The damage has already been done, with or without the woman. It has become almost impossible to carry on living with each other the way they used to.Bo Ba Bu is a strange, cruel kind of exotic parable. The landscape is a fictional stretch of desert, a barren plain where the sand meets the sky in every direction. The men are just barbarians who only emit animal growls: their names are Bo and Ba, and they say Bu. The woman is Arielle Dombasle, known for instance from Pauline à la plage by Eric Rohmer: an actress like a Barbie doll with an elegant figure and long golden hair. The men drag her along with them, dress her, feast their eyes on her pale flesh and inspect her disposition like a cow. In a pleasantly incorrect and ambivalently ironic way, a tragic three-cornered relationship is portrayed in which trust and loyalty can assume surprising forms.
