Following our discussion of African film, I ordered Xala up from the local library and was scanning around Netflix when I saw Gio had put this film on her queue, and when I saw that it was the director of Bamako (a film I’d read a lot about in the last year), I bumped it up the queue and watched last night: outstanding film.
Abderrahmane Sissako’s film is set in Mauritania, a remote city/town where the bleached light brown of the sands blurs into the bleached light brown of the square homes. Abdallah (Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamed) is a sore thumb, of sorts, sticking out in his collared shirts, his lack of facility with the local language, his red converse. He’s doing a lot of lying about, waiting to leave–to where, for what never precisely defined. We also meet a variety of local characters, the very young Khatra (Khatra Ould Abder Kader) who is son (or mentee?) to sort-of electrician Maata (Maata Ould Mohamed Abeid), these two having more prominent roles and storylines than the multiple other players. There is a lot of waiting–sitting, sipping tea, talking with others. The camera work involves many fixed shots, carefully framed (and echoed in the stark lines of hanging sheets, the precise geometry of squared windows in the middle of shots), with vibrant colors (in clothes on and off bodies) standing out against the bleached beige everywhere, all around.
It might be a film–in title, in languid narrative motion, in its fixed camerawork–riffing on the impossibility of reaching happiness, on a bleak existential vision, as some reviewers seem to think. But I found it warm and inviting, more–as the director describes in a brief interview on the dvd–like a poem on the intersections of repetition and difference, with images and events which rhyme or echo throughout the film, rather than a specific linear narrative. It’s often slyly funny, reminiscent of Jarmusch and Kaurismaki in the deployment of a “sight gag” which recurs in painstaking detail over the course of a long shot. For instance, a taxi driver’s license and paperwork stored in the sunscreen above him keeps falling down, and we watch this in a shot from behind happen a couple of times, then from the front we see it recur (over the course of a few minutes)–and then, to my delight, the fall is repeated towards film’s conclusion–as if to signal the pattern of life and the reward of watching every small detail. It’s also flat gorgeous, with a few images transcendent — a lit lightbulb carried through twilight over sweeping sand dunes by the tall gaunt Maata and the boy Khatra, with a huge red globe (the moon?) hanging just over the horizon.
I find myself chewing on its meanings, but without a linear plot as such the film resists being boiled down into themes and messages. Still, there is a sense of culture as deep history, patterns which recur ceaselessly, may be even frighteningly constricted, and thus Abdallah’s desire to get out; yet equally there is a sense of the vibrant changeability, of the integration of differences into communal life and patterns. (A Japanese immigrant? worker? visitor? sings karaoke and seems to have a date with a local woman, then disappears from the film; the red converse sneakers pop up in various places.) Maata and Khatra have at first silly but increasingly somber discussions of death, and the boy’s movement toward “knowledge” is something we clearly get yet also do not know quite how to interpret.
And this perhaps leads me around back to discussions of the film as African film. Clearly the director signals in interviews and his subsequent work (Bamako is a literalized indictment of the World Bank and IMF by Africa, amongst other things) that he is trying to convey some sense of the place and its people and its concerns. But formally this film struck me as, as noted, akin to Jarmusch and Kaurismaki and their antecedents, particularly the great silent filmmakers–the use of frame counterpointed by the people interacting struck me as akin to Buster Keaton or maybe some of Jacques Tati; or maybe Elia Suleiman’s stark, funny, mostly-silent Divine Intervention, set usually at the crossing between Israel and Palestinian settlements. The director went to film school in the Soviet Union and himself acknowledges the influence of Eisenstein and Pudovkin. I would have trouble defining the politics of the film’s aesthetics as defined through its cultural context or background; instead, the film’s form seems to work contrapuntally with its representation of culture, not wholly “other” but using a visual style familiar to other artists breaking the dominant mode of narrative cinema.
Yet clearly “culture” is part of what the film focuses on: a French game show intrigues Abdallah, there are undefined but obvious cross-cultural conversations between various characters. Change happens, is inevitable–and maybe there isn’t any “thing” there before the change. And yet we also see Khatra slowly learning a trade (of sorts), and then by film’s end taking it up as his own; we see another young girl learning how to sing a song, and by film’s end she’s got it down, and is now performing it uncoached. Things are passed along, and they matter; Khatra ends the film a solitary figure wandering the dunes, sort of comically outfitted and sort of sadly alone, yet at least for me I felt no sense but hope, that he would make his way out of the dunes and back into a community that might mean something to him.
Highly recommended.
i’d like echo mike’s recommendation. you write smartly and nicely about this lovely film, mike, and there’s not much i can add. i watched half one night and half the following night (it is that riveting!) and i felt guilty, the first night, for feeling becalmed by it. all those people lying and sitting around, looking unhurried and unharried, mostly at peace with themselves (the only one not at peace is abdallah, who’s on his way out and does not really belong there anyway), chatting or not (a group sits silently outside in the shadow of a house), made me feel happy. i am naturally drawn to a sedate, lying-around lifestyle, aided not in small part by not having television, and i sometimes feel uneasy about it, especially if i am not contributing to the economy by consuming something. so when my fantasy that “in other cultures” people practice doing nothing quite comfortably is confirmed, i feel encouraged and justified. but then, as i said, i felt guilty, because, not knowing how the film ended, i could have been mistaking calm for ennui and displacement. also, i felt guilty for exoticizing and generalizing and being silly.
turns out that, no, really, Sissako means the film to convey a sense of tranquility. in the notes he attaches to a few stills, he says that the transit village in which the film takes place and whose name is heremakono, or “waiting for happiness” — a common name in mali, in which sissako also lived, for villages from which people dapart for other shores — is already experiencing happiness, because happiness is in the journey, the idea of the journey, the anticipation and preparation for the journey.
some of the village’s people are rooted in this happy transitional space. maata, the village’s not-very-good electrician, tells a story about having been offered a ticket to leave with a friend. but “i didn’t want to leave,” he says, “and i didn’t want my friend to leave.” another character, who may be a villager or someone staying there in preparation for departure, talks about leaving but is not sure. other characters discuss a certain michael, who may by now be in tangiers or in spain.
in other words, leaving is not unproblematic. sissako, however, doesn’t portray it as a matter of desperation. life in the village seems nice enough, with little shops that have what is needed (meat, power supplies), door-to-door salesmen, running electricity, acculturation (the music lessons for the little girl), and formal social gatherings. in the interview mike mentions sissako talks about departures as generous acts, the willingness to go out and forge new connections, create new civilizations. clearly, sissako is not a blind idealist. he knows that africans are not exactly welcomed with open arms in europe. watching a film such as this is incredibly educational for the european eye, because it allows us to see the immigrants who teems at the shady margins of our societies in the luminous lands from which they hail and in which their presence is marked not by skulking and marginalization, but by calm, happy belonging.
in the scene that mike mentions, in which abdallah sits alone in front of a tv set watching a french quiz show, you first see abdallah, then the film cuts on the tv, and when it comes back to abdallah, abdallah is gone and the couch is empty. as he also says in the interview, sissako is intent on mirroring to the african his and her culture, not the culture that’s imported from the west. africans, he poignantly observes, don’t get to see themselves on the screen very often. which, if you think about it, can be just as big a tragedy as any.
even the strong wind that constantly blows from the ocean onto the beach and the sand on which the village is built feels calming and pleasant by the end, itself a carrier of things from other places, a messenger of sorts.
let us not forget, too, that the village itself is a mixture of cultures, with its two languages (french and hassaniya, an arabic-based dialect) and its different races (arabs and blacks). the movie characters switch regularly between the two languages, sometimes being addressed in one and replying in the other. and the very french-looking police speak only french. it’d be interesting to see how this plays to the mauritanian eye, and to have a sense of the relative fluency of the various characters in each of the two languages. and since mauritania and mali no longer have movie theatres, the locals will have to watch the film the same way we do, on tv sets. which seems interesting to me, though i’m not sure why.