DVR Diary: EMITAI (1971)

World War II wasn't the "good war" everywhere. Far from Europe, in Europe's colonies, what Hitler was up to hardly mattered. In some places the Allies, the good guys of the usual narrative were the oppressors. That's the context of Ousmane Sembene's war picture, which shows the war's impact on the Diola people in French-ruled Senegal. They and their crops are resources for France to draw upon at will. Emitai starts with colonial troops pressing villagers into military service. The young men must listen to a French officer praise them for volunteering and exhort them to revere and obey Marshal Petain, at that moment (Spring 1940) France's last hope against the Nazis. One year later, Petain leads a collaborationist regime, but France's alignment means little to the Diola, who are now required to give up their rice crops to the colonial power. The village elders debate the necessity for revolt and, perhaps more importantly, the will of the gods. Their chief has grown skeptical toward the pantheon -- if not toward their existence, then toward their effectiveness in this modern crisis. Ironically, it's he, mortally wounded in a futile uprising, who receives a vision of the gods. They chide him for his lack of faith, while he reproaches them for their apparent indifference to their worshipers' dire situation. After he dies, the film slows down as the village prepares for the chief's funeral, the remaining elders -- in hiding from the colonial troops -- ponder how to appease the gods and/or the French, while two French officers and their native troops hold the women and children hostage, with rice as the ransom. Sembene's deliberate, novelistic pacing -- he was a novelist before taking up the camera -- immerses the viewer in the life of the embattled village while steadily heating up indignation against the elders' preoccupation with the gods. They balk (rightly) at sacrificing rice to the French, but then one sacrifices a goat to the gods on impulse. The bawling animal has its throat cut and bleeds out before being dumped like so much garbage. Sembene respects Diola culture in the broadest sense but is clearly secular in his sympathies, or at least highly critical toward religion. The elders' folly sometimes nearly overshadows the oppression of the French, who switch sides in the world war, abandoning Petain for de Gaulle, with no change in their treatment of the Diola. But the film ends with a sharp reminder that, whatever their faults, the elders, like their fellow villagers, are essentially villagers of a regime that must have seemed little better to them than any tale of Nazi rule the French might have told them. Unsurprisingly, several years passed before either Senegalese or French people could see Emitai, but films like Sembene's are valuable, not necessarily as correctives to a particular narrative of World War II, but as examples of perspectives from which the moral drama of that conflict is not and never will be central, and the winners of it may never be the good guys.

MANDABI (1968)

Ibrahim Dieng lives off the grid. Born "around 1900," he was around before the grid. His country, Senegal, has been independent from France for less than a decade at the time of Ousmane Sembene's picture. In Africa, you could do worse than Senegal; the country's never had a coup and its first president was a man of letters, albeit one who threw his first prime minister in prison. Whether any of this matters to Ibrahim is unclear. The country is poor and so is he. He struggles to make ends meet from day to day, with two wives and their children to support and no job for four years. He lives off store credit, borrowing from friends and relatives, and favors from politicians and bureaucrats. An unusual windfall comes when a nephew working his way through night school as a Paris street sweeper sends a money order (in Wolof, "mandabi") for 25,000 francs to be divided between Ibrahim and his sister's family. Wonderful news! All Ibrahim has to do is cash the money order and he can pay off his tab at the neighborhood store and keep his family fed for a while.

But to cash the money order he needs identification, and he has none. To get I.D., he needs a birth certificate and a photograph. To get a birth certificate he needs to know the exact date of his birth; "around 1900" won't cut it. To get a photo he has to depend on the drunken shutterbugs in a storefront studio. To travel through town he has to borrow bus fare from people, though the promise of that money order makes the borrowing easier. Meanwhile, people are already lining up to borrow from him, or to borrow the money he borrows to finish all the steps toward getting his I.D. and cashing that money order. At every stage, people are ripping him off. A would-be fixer promises to expedite his cashing a check made out by a patron to tide him over and claims a 300 franc commission on behalf of a bank teller who probably doesn't know who he is. The photographers take his money in advance and blow him off later, telling him the picture "didn't work out" in the developing room. A bureaucrat finally has Ibrahim give him power of attorney so he can cash the money order. Two days later, he tells our hapless hero, "I'm not going to lie to you; I was the victim of a pickpocket." Ibrahim can guess the truth quickly enough, but what can he do? What can anyone do when "honesty is a sin" in Senegal?...

 

Above and below: Ibrahim at the stations of his cross

 

 

(It's just his luck to pick the Dakar franchise of the Freddie Quell Studio chain)

 

There's a temptation to call Mandabi Kafkaesque, but let's remember that "Kafkaesque" is just a label to describe a system of relationships that Sembene, adapting his own novel, perceives directly in social-realist terms. Mandabi is a bitter protest against corruption pervading every level of Senegalese society, but its hero isn't immune from his author's scorn. Sembene starts out making Ibrahim (Makhouredia Gueye) as disgusting as possible, slobbishly eating a gooey meal with his bare hands and belching painfully afterward. I assume he intends his audience to find his domineering attitude toward his wives contemptible as well, though the women aren't saints, either. After Ibrahim gets his nose bloodied in a scuffle with the photographers, they start wailing as if he'd been beaten to the brink of death and his precious money order stolen outright, in order to reap the charity of sympathetic saps in the neighborhood, and they're unrepentant when Ibrahim rebukes them afterward. Everyone looks for every opportunity to take advantage of everyone else. As a whole, Ibrahim is presented as a loser, and hardly a lovable one. At the same time, we can't help asking how hard it should be for the poor dope to get that money order cashed. That Ibrahim is mostly an unsympathetic character makes Mandabi a kind of black comedy, yet you can't escape the conclusion that he's been treated unfairly, that his predicament isn't necessarily his just desserts for being illiterate and shiftless, but definitely proof of all-encompassing injustice of which he's certainly not the only victim.

Mandabi is appropriately raw looking, though I don't think the prominent boom mike shadow in one important scene was strictly necessary. Sembene's story doesn't need to be told in any flashy fashion; his biggest indulgences are the Paris scenes of the industrious nephew at work and one use of a wipe between scenes. The film's points of appeal are the universality of a poor man's plight in an increasingly complicated society and the novel immediacy (for the global audience) of its portrait of urban Senegal in the country's formative years. In the lead role, Gueye runs an emotional gamut impressively, from arrogance to abjection, begging for bus fare at one moment and blowing off panhandlers at another. He pulls off the film's necessary trick of getting you to pity its unappealing protagonist. Like some of Warner Bros's pre-Code pictures, a damning or cynical portrait of poverty and corruption in Mandabi is marred slightly at the end by a mini-lecture delivered by one of the rare virtuous characters, a postman who tells a despairing Ibrahim that "we" should change their corrupt society, but Sembene redeems the moment and keeps the hero in character by having Ibrahim respond in self-pitying bafflement. Sembene's film -- his first in his native language -- may attract us as an authentic window into 1960s Africa, but his story has a timeless relevance that gives Mandabi more than merely historical value.

MOOLAADE (2004)

It's been a long time since I saw an African film, and as I try to catch up with the late decade in order to compose a Top 25 for the Wonders in the Dark poll I thought I should check out the final movie by Sembene Ousmane, the Senegalese auteur generally hailed as the father of the African feature film. This valedictory effort got a lot of positive attention in the art house community when it reached America because Sembene was tackling the subject of female genital mutilation and taking the understandably progressive view that it's a bad thing. He was bound to be cheered for his message alone, but how was Moolaade as cinema?

Sembene's main character, Colle, is the middle wife of a middling villager. Like most women, she underwent the Purification as tradition dictates, but it didn't go well. The botched ritual operation by the Salimbana made pregnancies difficult for Colle, who lost two babies before a daughter was saved by caesarian section. That daughter, now a teenager, is a Bilakoro. Never having been cut, she's considered unfit to be a bride. Because Colle got away with sparing her daughter the ordeal, a group of four girls seek her protection when their cutting time comes. She grants them "Protection" by invoking the Moolaade tradition. Whoever crosses the sacred thread to seize the girls will be cursed. The great irony of the film is that Colle's traditionalist enemies are kept at bay by tradition, even while they try to stomp out other incursions of modernity.

They cut girls terribly young in Moolaade's African village, but not if Colle (Fatoumata Coulibaly) can help it.

The village has an ambivalent relationship to the modern world. Their main daily link is the local merchant, Mercenaire, who seems to make most of his money from batteries and day-old bread from the big city. The batteries run radios and the radios play modern music and commentaries that challenge local traditions. The elders will blame radios for subverting their authority and confiscate them from their wives, building a mound destined to become a bonfire of vanities. Mercenaire himself has seen the wider world; he was a UN peacekeeper who was busted for exposing corruption among his superiors, or so he says. We learn later that he's ripping off the villagers, overcharging them for the bread and probably for other stuff. On the other hand, he clearly disapproves of how the elders (including the female Salimbana) try to break Colle's will, and he's the one who finally steps up to defend her when her husband publicly whips her (albeit goaded himself by his cousin) in an attempt to force her to say the word that will revoke the Moolaade. He pays a dire price for interfering. But while Mercenaire is scapegoated as a representative of subversive modernity, the village is really very dependent on the chief's son Ibrahima, who brings home the big bucks by working in France. Among the things he brings home on his latest visit (when Colle's daughter hopes he'll marry her) is a TV set. Ibrahima is quite westernized, switching back and forth from native to European dress and recognizing Mercenaire's literary references. You expect him to become the hero of the picture, but Mercenaire beats him to the punch, and his own conflict with his father sometimes looks like that of a spoiled brat with a petty tyrant bickering (literally) over TV privileges. It's not until a critical mass of village women take Colle's side after another botched Purification that Ibrahima takes a decisive stand that seems to assure a happy ending.

Moolaade is mainly about female empowerment and it has a bit of an agitprop quality to it. I have to admit that the genital-mutilation question is pretty one-sided one for most American observers, but I can't help feeling that making that the battleground between tradition and modernity kind of stacks the deck in favor of the latter. I'm not saying that I'd be receptive to the case against modernity (what would that be anyway? Powaqqatsi?), but I think a deeper film would give that case more of a fair hearing than Sembene did this time out. I'd also concede that there are times and places when Sembene's approach is the appropriate, even necessary one.

Watching the film in cinematic-tourist mode, I was dazzled by Moolaade's artistry. Its village setting (in Burkina Faso) at first seems so abstract to the western eye, what with its eccentric mosque and Gaudi-like giant anthill, that it looks like a Tim Burton set. In time it takes on a lived-in quality and its strangeness doesn't stick out as much, but Sembene still exploits the architecture for starkly powerful effect. The defining shots of the film may be those that juxtapose three rival monuments: the mosque, the anthill (said to house the spirit of a defeated king) and the growing pile (later pyre) of radios -- some of which the elders don't even bother turning off. Sembene and cinematographer Dominique Gentil also have a strong shared eye for color in landcape and costume; this film is always great to look at. The actors are constrained by their good guy/bad guy assignments. Fatoumata Coulibaly is appropriately stalwart as Colle, but Dominique Zeida nearly steals the film, in my eyes, as Mercenaire, the most complex character.

I suspect my mild reservations about Moolaade's agitprop qualities won't trouble most people who give it a try. It's a strong crowd-pleasing story that should have any viewer on its side from the start and a good indicator of what African cinema can do. If someone wants to try a film from the continent, I'd have no problem recommending this one.

The English-language trailer was uploaded to YouTube by k364: