Moolaadé
by Chris Dashiell

In the world of international cinema, there are still a few giants lumbering around. One of them is Ousmane Sembene, a writer, social activist, and film director from Senegal who practically founded African cinema, being the first to produce and direct independent films in the postcolonial era. Now, at over eighty years of age, he's created what is possibly his most powerful work: Moolaadé . It deals with the controversial practice of female circumcision -- a difficult and painful subject, but Sembene also expands the film's vision to include the plight of modern Africa itself.

In a village in Burkina Faso , as the ceremony of so-called purification approaches, four young girls who don't want to be cut run for sanctuary to a woman named Collé, known in the village as a rebel since she refused to have her own daughter cut in the ceremony. Collé invokes the tradition of "Moolaadé," a spell of protection which cannot be broken without incurring devastating retaliation by the spirits. Tying a string of colored yarn across the entrance to her home keeps the girls safe within the sanctuary and the angry village elders and ceremonial followers out.

The story, with its exploration of the power relations between men and women, is fascinating in itself. But Sembene also uses it to explore the whole fabric of village life, with its songs and rhythms and ambivalent relationship to the outside world, symbolized by the radios that the women love to listen to. This is not the usual Western-style film with dramatic pace -- we are gradually immersed, instead, through the collection of little details that eventually accumulate into a poetic world-view. The wide-screen composition and color give the picture a contemplative beauty even as the story's conflict becomes more and more intense. Sembene has a talent for letting a scene stretch out into its own natural rhythm. His non-professional actors seem thoroughly at home.

Collé is the second wife of a village elder -- her relationship with the first wife, which at first seems to be one of simple opposition, becomes humorously rich and complicated. In fact, each major character and relationship is given a chance to develop in interesting ways. A traveling merchant, known in the village as a ladies' man, reveals unexpected depths of character. Sembene also introduces a successful young man, the son of one of the village elders, engaged to Collé's daughter, who returns from Paris in his suit and tie. Here the film examines the uneasy intrusion of modernity into traditional life, with the conflict over genital mutilation played out indirectly in the contest for this young man's allegiance -- will he renounce his engagement to the girl who has not been cut? There is beauty in the old ways, but also ignorance and oppression, and the movie is wise enough to acknowledge both of these aspects.

By the time the issue of what will happen to the girls comes to a head, the viewer has become so involved in the life of this village that the outcome is fraught with tension. We get to witness how customs based on arbitray power hurt both victims and perpetrators. Moolaadé is provocative in the best sense, giving all sides their due before resolving things in a courageous display of solidarity.

Quick takes:

Relatively lost in the Oscar shuffle was Terry George's Hotel Rwanda. While it is true that the film, as a document of genocide, does not achieve the radically engaging effect that might have made it great, it's by no means a negligible work. Don Cheadle is excellent as Paul Rusesabagina, assistant manager at a prestigious hotel catering to European and American guests in Rwanda in 1994, who finds himself thrust into the role of rescuer when hundreds of refugees flee to the hotel during the massacres. Cheadle portrays the gradual disillusionment of a sophisticated westernized African, self-confident and cultured, who must come to terms with the unimaginable. The performance is strong and self-assured -- not a Hollywood hero, but a very real and fallible one.

It was only ten years ago that about 800,000 human beings were butchered in Rwanda , many of them killed by machetes. No film could possibly capture the enormity of this. What Hotel Rwanda does is convey what it might have felt like to be in the middle of such a terrifying event, with roving gangs of killers, demagogues screaming to their followers on the radio to exterminate the "cockroaches," which is what they called the Tutsis, and the western world turning its back on the tragedy and refusing to help. This is one very tense story. Watching this, you'll know that horror movies can't compete with the real horrors of history. The minute-to-minute fight for survival is almost unbearably grueling and suspenseful. But it's a story that needed to be told, and this film tells it with conviction.

Enough ink has been spilled on Million Dollar Baby to make my review more than redundant. For the record, I thought the "film noir" visual style worked in the context of this boxing story, with its tough-guy street poetry and old man's wisdom. People complained about the voice-over and compared it to The Shawshank Redemption , but I thought it was compact and evocative, unlike Shawshank , which was long-winded, preachy, and obvious. The real point of the film is the father-daughter relationship between the Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank characters, and here Eastwood shines both as actor and director. He built the tenderness up slowly and carefully, until its consummation delivered a powerful emotional payoff.

Having said all that, however, I have to say that the picture ended up being wildly overpraised, and the simplicity of its approach embraced too readily in a year when many films explored more interesting -- and troubling -- aspects of the human predicament. On reflection, my thoughts turn back to Million Dollar Baby's biggest misstep: the portrayal of the Swank character's white trash family. The greatest artists extend their love to all their characters and try to avoid using them as targets to score points with. Here, when Maggie gives her mother a house, the woman immediately starts complaining that she will lose her Social Security benefits if she accepts the house. Similar techniques are used later to make the mother, and the other family members (who all look like exaggerated "dumb hick" caricatures) look as bad as possible. A more thoughtful approach would make them try to seem real -- perhaps their motives are selfish, but they need to be portrayed as people, with all the potential for ambiguity that involves. Eastwood goes for the cheap shot, which seems to have an underlying message that hard workers like Maggie should be admired in contrast to deadbeat welfare mothers. A great artist would have avoided that, and the film would have been better for being more human. I think there's a wider lesson here. The things that might please us at first glance in a story don't necessarily reflect a sense of truth. They might just be confirming a prejudice.

©2005 Chris Dashiell
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