It doesn't take long to figure out that Waiting For Happiness, a somnambulant piece of Afro-ennui from Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako, is the type of movie where happiness is not forthcoming. Incident seems equally hard to come by in the damnable wasteland Sissako chooses for a setting: a West African seaside village where the sand-swept locals are stuck between continents, some hoping for European emigration and others left permanently at the station. Nothing much happens in the film, which functions more as a gently poetic slice of life than a conventional narrative, yet its leisurely rhythms capture the unique tenor of the place, even while the characters remain frustratingly elusive. Though he cuts near-equally among several different threads, Sissako sets the mood of alienation and exile through alter ego Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamed, a 17-year-old who returns home to see his mother and finds he's a stranger in his own land. Decked out in non-traditional suits and button-down shirts, Mohamed has long since forgotten his local dialect, so he spends his days reading and watching the foot traffic as it passes the window in his street-level room. While Mohamed prepares to emigrate to Europe, others settle in for the long haul, including the bright young Khatra Ould Abder Kader, a little boy who tags along with the village's aging electrician (Maata Ould Mohamed Abeid), determined to carry on the trade. In other minor episodes, a displaced Asian watch salesman woos a local woman with a stirring karaoke performance and a mother teaches her daughter to sing songs and play on a traditional string instrument. Sissako was inspired in some part by his own experiences; his identification with these poor, disenfranchised characters, as well as his deadpan comic style, recalls Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki (The Man Without A Past), who has always had a warm affinity for transient heroes. But the similarities end there: Where Kaurismäki's best work looks at forgotten lives with abundant generosity, Sissako directs his gaze toward the navel, preferring to leave things opaque and open to interpretation, like Rorschach inkblots. The most resonant images in Waiting For Happiness are of the village, a dusty, ephemeral ghost town with makeshift houses and jerry-rigged electricity, where residents stare out at abandoned barges washed up near the shore. In a way, the mundane inhabitants can't be blamed for behaving like life has been drained out of them.