Monthly Archives: August 2023

  • Black Girl

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La noire de …

    Ousmane Sembène (1966)

    Ousmane Sembène is a well-known name and the label ‘father of African cinema’ is usually attached to it but his work has been a closed book to me until now.  This month’s BFI retrospective, marking the centenary of Sembène’s birth, includes, as a double bill, his short film Niaye (1964) and Black Girl, his first and most celebrated feature – which is also widely regarded as the first feature film made by any Black African.  Born in the Casamance region of Senegal, Sembène moved as a teenager to Dakar, where he did manual labouring jobs.  He served in the French Liberation Army during World War II and had further blue-collar work in France in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  He taught himself to read and write in French (his mother tongue was Wolof) and published his first novel in 1956.  Two more novels and a collection of short stories had followed by the time his first short film appeared in 1963.  Both Niaye and Black Girl derive from Sembène short stories.

    Ex Africa semper aliquid novi ­… and it takes a while to adjust to the unusual form of Niaye, a fabular drama of hypocrisy in a Muslim village in Senegal, where a girl has been impregnated by her father, the village chief.  Drama is certainly the word in terms of how much incident is packed into the film’s thirty minutes.  The pregnant girl goes into hiding.  Her brother, Tanor, has returned from military service in Indochina out of his mind.  Their mother, Ngoné War Thiandum, overwhelmed by the accretion of dishonour in the family, commits suicide.  Acting on the instructions of his uncle, Tanor kills his father.  The uncle’s men kill the patricide and the usurper becomes village chief.  A key figure in the narrative is the griot.  A dictionary definition of the word is ‘member of a class of travelling poets, musicians and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa’ but it seems the griot also functions as the conscience of a community.  Sembène’s griot, appalled by what he has witnessed, decides to abandon the village and seek a home where ‘truth does not only belong to the nobles’.  Shortly after departing, he thinks again and returns.  The daughter and her newborn baby are ejected from the village.

    Drama isn’t quite the word, though, to describe Niaye‘s narrative style and the disjunction between figures on the screen and voices on the soundtrack.  Sembène’s cast mostly comprises real members of a village community and the acting is basic albeit there are arresting camera subjects, especially Mame Dia as Ngoné.  The other credited performers are Modou Sène as Tanor and Serigne Sow as the griot.  Voiceover comes not only from the latter but also from a female counterpart, a griote (Astou N’Diaye) who gives voice to Ngoné’s thoughts.  (Interesting that more than four decades later, according to IMDb, Astou N’Diaye played the mother of one of the major characters in Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019).)

    Immediately before his murder, Tanor sees in his mind’s eye the warfare he has recently been part of, a vision that includes aircraft and a flock of descending parachutes.  Near the end of the film, the banished teenage mother, just outside the village, puts her baby down beside a tree, preparing to abandon the child.  There are birds (vultures?) overhead; their noise is accompanied by the baby’s crying.  The mother picks up the baby and walks on with it.  This visual echo is one of several striking images, which also include the dark umbrella that the usurper chief always carries in the hot sun.  The deranged Tanor, still wearing his army fatigues, cuts a bizarre figure as he marches or dances round the village, brandishing a French tricolour and leading local children in a chorus of  ‘Auprès de ma blonde‘.  The persistent chanting and instrumentals from Fatou Casset (a real-life griote) and Kèba Faye will mean something to audience members with knowledge of or feeling for West African folk music.  For me (without either), the emphatic, often angry voiceovers – spoken in French – made for more powerful listening.

    Photographed, like Niaye, in black and white, Sembène’s first feature (though it’s barely an hour long) is a more familiar narrative.  Black Girl moves back and forth between present and past.  The present describes the increasing hopelessness of Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), a young Senegalese newly arrived in France to work for a white family.  The past comprises extended flashbacks to her life in Dakar and the events that brought her to Europe.  Niaye supplies a bridge to several important aspects of Black Girl, including the pernicious effects of colonialism and the implicitly related corruption of indigenous African culture.  As before, a voiceover conveys what the film’s images often conceal and, in keeping with its anti-colonialism, speaks French as if resenting the language.

    The flashbacks explain that Diouana hails from a poor village outside Dakar, where she tries to find work.  Women in her position regularly gather in the city square, which prospective employers regularly visit.  Diouana is untypical in that she doesn’t vociferously demand to be chosen for employment.  She thereby attracts the attention of a French woman (Anne-Marie Jelinek), known simply as ‘Madame’, who hires Diouana as nanny to her and her husband’s children.  Monsieur (Robert Fontaine) is a civil servant currently working in Dakar.  When his posting there ends and the family returns home to the south of France, Diouana is thrilled to be asked to continue working for them there.  She has no regrets about leaving Senegal or parting from her clean-cut boyfriend (Momar Nar Sene).  In Antibes, Diouana is dismayed that her household duties are entirely menial, mostly cooking and cleaning; it’s a while before any of the children she thought she’d be caring for even returns to the family home (I missed the reason why).  In Dakar, Diouana falls in love with France on the strength of magazine pictures; eager to explore her new country, she finds herself a virtually housebound skivvy.  She still dresses up to do her work, though, at least until Madame sharply reminds her she’s only a maid.  A letter arrives from her mother, lamenting that Diouana hasn’t been in touch and asking for money.  Monsieur reads the letter to Diouana, who later tears it up.

    The film’s French name is richer than the English one.  The ‘de’ could introduce either the title character’s place of origin or, in its possessive sense, her owner’s identity; thanks to the ellipsis that’s also a full stop, it introduces neither.  Those three dots render the heroine’s identity uncertain, even mysterious (as in Max Ophüls’ Madame de … (1953)).  They also hint at Diouana’s uprootedness.  Like Diaye, Black Girl features some primitive acting though it’s of a somewhat different kind here (the dubbed voices probably don’t help).  Anne-Marie Jelinek’s one-note portrait of unkind Madame is uncomfortably crude but Sembène’s central themes wouldn’t emerge so strongly if Jelinek were more nuanced:  it’s essential that the viewer sees Madame (and the rather more ambiguous Monsieur) from Diouana’s point of view.  The protagonist is not only reticent; tall, lissom Mbissine Thérèse Diop is mostly limited in what she expresses in her face and movement.  But this is surely Sembène’s intention too.  Diouana is in no position to speak her mind or show her feelings.

    According to Wikipedia, ‘Critics in the US and Europe did not initially recognize Black Girl‘s lasting power’.  In 2022, the film appeared in the top 100 in Sight & Sound’s decennial poll (placing joint ninety-fifth).  The difference between its initial reception and canonical status today isn’t, however, quite as stark as that implies.  Sembène received the 1966 Jean Vigo Prize for Black Girl.  (The Vigo, awarded annually by a jury since 1951, is usually given to a young or new film-maker:  the latest recipient is Alice Diop for Saint Omer (2022).)   The film was first shown in the USA in 1969 and Manny Farber placed it first in his top ten films of that year, commending it as ‘unlike anything else in the film library:  translucent and no tricks, amazingly pure, but spiritualized by a black man’s grimness in which there is not an ounce of grudge or finger-pointing’.  In his collected reviews published a couple of years later, Farber cites Black Girl as a prime recent example of the ‘termite art’ that he defined and admired.  Besides, the picture’s promotion to official classic in 2022 may have less to do with greater appreciation of its artistry than with changes in the political climate of film criticism.  A selection of quotes on the BFI website from those who voted for Black Girl in last year’s S&S poll refers to it as an ‘evisceration of the myth of liberté, égalité, fraternité’ and ‘a searing example of Black feminine refusal’.

    Those predictable formulations aren’t wrong, though, and Farber, despite his convincing description of what’s on the screen in Black Girl, takes less account of what’s on the soundtrack.  Diouana’s attitude and behaviour suggest affectlessness but her bitter voiceover tells a different story.  This is so in scenes both with her French employers and with her African boyfriend.  In one of the flashbacks, the boyfriend makes a move to embrace her; Diouana resists his touch but not in a forceful movement.   Yet her voiceover asserts that ‘he was too familiar – I stormed off’.  In Antibes and Dakar alike, Diouana’s most physically extrovert moments tend to be expressions not of misery but of relative exuberance.  Manny Farber singles out as the film’s ‘most charming image’, ‘a very long-legged girl teetering around the kitchen on foot-long high heels and a dust rag in her hands’.  Shortly before she leaves Senegal, Diouana and her boyfriend walk by a monument commemorating the dead of both World Wars.  While the boyfriend briefly imagines veterans placing a wreath at the memorial, Diouana climbs the monument for a jaunty walk that becomes a dance – presumably in celebration of her imminent departure for France.  The boyfriend, shocked and embarrassed by her levity, instructs her to come down immediately.  She complies, seeming to resume her more usual passivity.

    Diouna eventually kills herself, slitting her throat as she lies in the bath in the Antibes house.  The suicide has all the more shocking impact because she has been so undemonstrative – has seemed to lack what is now known as agency.  Her death isn’t quite the end of Black Girl.  In the closing stages, another African face, perhaps the film’s most compelling one, comes to the fore.  In Dakar, Diouana, as a gesture of gratitude to her French employers, makes them a gift of a traditional mask which she buys from a boy (Ibrahima Boy) on the street.  In Antibes, it hangs on the wall; a rare physical confrontation between her and Madame sees Diouana try and fail to take the mask back.  After her death, Monsieur flies to Senegal with Diouana’s suitcase and the mask, as well as money which he offers to her mother.  The offer is refused.  As Monsieur leaves the village and returns to the airport, he’s followed all the way by the young boy who sold the mask and who now wears it.  Senegal achieved independence from France in 1960.  For much of Black Girl (as in Niaye), Ousmane Sembène seems to illustrate the futility of nominal independence for a country lacking a flourishing national culture or moral purpose.  As a piece of domestic decoration in a white home in France, the mask is reduced to an exotic souvenir.  Yet this symbol of West African identity never disappears.  And in the conclusion to this remarkable film it is literally on the move.

    8 August 2023

  • The Birdcage

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mike Nichols (1996)

    I hadn’t seen La Cage aux Folles in any of its stage or screen versions until Sally and I went to the current revival of the Harvey Fierstein-Jerry Herman musical at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre.  Watching this was a prompt to make up for lost time as far as films based on Jean Poiret’s play (originally staged in 1973) are concerned.  The first La Cage aux Folles picture (1978), directed by Édouard Molinaro, isn’t available on Netflix or Amazon Prime so we tried Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage.  I’m guessing we may now have seen treatments as different from each other as it’s possible to get while staying essentially faithful to the source material.  Tim Sheader’s production in Regent’s Park is a good show with some brilliant dancing but unsatisfying as musical comedy.  There’s not an interesting characterisation in sight:  as one half of the central gay partnership and the eponymous nightclub’s drag headliner, Carl Mullaney, although certainly the star performer, shows all the emotional vulnerability of a pantomime dame.  In contrast, Mike Nichols is almost indifferent to the nightclub routines, which are few and peripheral to a richer confection of rom-com farce and political satire.  (The latter almost anticipates Nichols’s next film, Primary Colors (1998).)

    The Birdcage is full of splendid character work and I enjoyed it a lot even though the film feels in two ways tentative.  One aspect of this is puzzling.  Nichols occasionally gives the impression of still making up his mind how a scene should be staged and played with the result that it seems like a rehearsal.  The other aspect is less unexpected.  The first Broadway production of the Fierstein-Herman musical – and Gloria Gaynor’s hit with ‘I Am What I Am’, the show’s signature number – preceded The Birdcage by over a decade.  Even so, the movie was made well before LGBTQ+ identity was widely proclaimed or presented as mainstream, as it is in plenty of media treatment today.  Nichols’s film isn’t timid but does give off a slight don’t-frighten-the-horses vibe, thanks to rationed coverage of the drag show and some stereotyping of the gay characters (that’s what it now looks like anyway).

    Stephen Sondheim wrote a couple of tracks for it but The Birdcage, compared with the Regent’s Park spectacle, is for the most part doubly unmusical.  Nichols’s choice of theme song is perfect, though.  Sister Sledge’s ‘We Are Family’, which features at both ends of the film, is a long-standing gay-club favourite; the song’s lyric can be seen to nod humorously both to the unusual family unit at the heart of the story and to ‘family values’ as a conservative political slogan, which is also crucial to the narrative.  Nichols’s old sparring partner Elaine May, who wrote the screenplay, has moved the action from St Tropez to South Beach in Miami:  Armand Goldman (Robin Williams) owns and runs The Birdcage club there; his life partner, Albert (Nathan Lane), tops the bill (as ‘Starina’).  The couple live over the shop, their ménage completed by the flamboyantly gay Guatemalan housekeeper, Agador (Hank Azaria), who longs to be part of the show downstairs.  Armand has a twenty-something son, Val (Dan Futterman), the result of his father’s long-ago drunken one-night stand with a woman who had better things to do than raise the boy.  Val grew up with Armand and Albert, who has been like a mother to him.   The plot’s mainspring is Val’s return home with the news that he’s getting married.  His fiancée is Barbara (Calista Flockhart), whose father is Republican Senator Kevin Keeley (Gene Hackman), Vice-President of the so-called Coalition for Moral Order.

    Keeley and his wife Louise (Dianne Wiest) get plenty of screen time from the start.  As an ambitious politician, Keeley is ‘very glad I got on Jackson’s bandwagon instead of Dole’s’ – until, that is, Senator Eli Jackson, co-founder of the Coalition, is found dead in bed alongside ‘an underage black whore’ (Trina McGee-Davis).  Keeley’s urgent need to extricate himself from the resulting scandal supplies a good reason to hotfoot it to Florida and, in doing so, reassert family values – though he makes clear to the press that his meeting with his daughter’s fiancé’s parents will be a private occasion.  The scandal also means the senator and his wife have cause to be nervous of their South Beach hosts’ moral disapproval, as well as vice versa.  That gives an extra edge to the dinner party chez Armand and Albert.  Nichols and May were evidently keen to get up-to-the-minute GOP lampooning into The Birdcage and the repeated references to Senator Bob Dole are a reminder of how impregnable a front-runner he was for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996.  The film was released in American cinemas in early March that year, well before the end of primaries season.  Yet the script is confident enough not to name-check real Republicans other than Dole (except for ‘the Bushes’ and neither Jeb nor Dubya was actually a candidate for the 1996 nomination).

    For the purposes of the Keeleys’ visit, Armand pretends to be a cultural attaché to Greece – that’s what Barbara has told her parents he is – as well as straight and less Jewishly surnamed (as ‘Mr Coleman’).  The household’s preparations for their guests involve frantic efforts to neutralise (a) the apartment’s décor and (b) Albert’s presence.  Armand, accompanied by Albert, visits Val’s mother, Katharine (Christine Baranski), now a highflying businesswoman, who agrees to a new one-night-only arrangement:  she’ll come to Miami posing as Armand’s wife.  Armand’s actual wife refuses to absent himself for the evening but reluctantly accepts the supporting role of Val’s sober-suited Uncle Albert.  Profoundly unmanly Albert is inept in the role:  everyone else is relieved when he can’t go through with it and locks himself away, almost literally in the closet.  Katharine gets stuck in traffic, however, so Albert decides to join the gathering in an uncharacteristically sensible wig, blouse, jacket and skirt.  Senator Keeley is charmed by frumpishly dressed-down Mrs Coleman and her folksy plain-speaking, though it sometimes has a sting in the tail.  When the senator pronounces that ‘Homosexuality is one of the things that’s weakening this country’, his hostess replies, ‘You know, that’s what I thought until I found out Alexander the Great was a fag.  Talk about gays in the military …’

    Gene Hackman produces an exquisitely uneasy look in response to that and the whole dinner party episode is a glorious display of ensemble comedy playing, verbal and physical.  Agador is made to change out of his usual maid’s wear – ‘big hair’ red wig, thong, etc – to pose in formal butler’s garb as ‘Spartacus’, who looks and moves like a member of the Addams family.  Agador normally goes round barefoot:  he warns Armand and Val that he falls over whenever he wears shoes and does just that even before the Keeleys are through the door.  (As the desperate momentum increases, the intentional pratfalls are so many you barely notice as unintended Robin Williams’s trip in the kitchen when Agador-Spartacus, who’s also chef for the night, is trying tearfully to defend his ‘sweet and sour peasant soup’.  This is a fine let’s-keep-it-in moment:  watching it back on YouTube, you can see and enjoy Hank Azaria’s and Dan Futterman’s strenuous efforts not to corpse.)  Things duly fall apart when Albert’s wig develops a life of its own and, while he and others are offstage trying to fix it, Katharine finally arrives late and introduces herself to the Keeleys as previously agreed.  But with a press pack gathering outside, Senator Keeley has no means of escaping unnoticed except via the nightclub and in disguise – that is, en travesti.  On the way out, to the strains of ‘We Are Family’, the bouffant-blonde senator still fares better than his wife.  She changes her dress, puts on drag make-up and is told by a Birdcage habitué, ‘I’ve never danced with a man before’.  ‘There’s always a first time’, Mrs Keeley replies throatily.

    The casting might come in for flak today:  Nathan Lane is the only gay actor playing a gay character – and he hadn’t come out publicly at the time The Birdcage was made.  Besides, he’s not trans and Albert is pretty well unarguably a woman trapped in a man’s body.  This is a performance of dexterity and charm even if Lane’s portrait of Albert, possibly because of his background in theatre (he hadn’t been in many films before this one), sometimes comes over as a highly accomplished turn.  It isn’t a major objection but I wasn’t sure Lane always distinguished Albert’s drama-queening from his genuine hurt feelings.  At the start, he’s refusing to go on stage as Starina, telling Armand that ‘I’m fat and hideous’ and Agador that ’Victoria Page will not dance the dance of the red shoes tonight – or any other night’.  It’s hard to discern much difference between this melodramatic posturing and Albert’s flouncing out after opening Katharine’s office door to see her running her fingers through Armand’s chest hair for old times’ sake.  On paper, the maid-artiste wannabe is more of a cartoon but Hank Azaria’s amazing vocal gifts make Agador somehow believable, as well as very funny.  Demanding to know why he can’t be in the show, he asks if Armand is ‘afraid of my Guatemalaness’ (pronounced Guate-male-a-ness).  There’s true pain in his voice as, sobbing over a hot stove, Agador insists his peasant soup wasn’t a starter but ‘an entrée … is like a stew – is why I put so much in it …’  (Azaria’s terrific Latino accent is also liable to censure nowadays, of course.)

    Greatly gifted as he was, there was always a risk that a Robin Williams performance would major in hyper-zaniness or sentimentality with not much in between.  It’s a relief that his playing of Armand is so well judged:  his comedy, one bull’s eye after another, is rooted in character; in Williams’s more obviously heartfelt bits, there’s only rarely a hint of moist eyes.  Dan Futterman manages a difficult balancing act:  he conveys Val’s dilemma without making him a prig and nicely avoids the potential mawkish pitfall of the big moment when Val comes clean to his in-laws-to-be and announces that Albert is ‘my mother’ and the nightclub’s leading lady.  Calista Flockhart has a thankless task but is likeable enough as Barbara.  Even though Katharine sometimes seems surplus to plot requirements, Christine Baranski is, as usual, good value.  Elaine May has written and/or borrowed from Jean Poiret so many great lines that it can’t be said the devil has all the best tunes.  But he does have the best two singers:  Dianne Wiest and Gene Hackman are outstanding as the reactionary Keeleys.

    Just as well because the screenplay’s political emphasis is a bit excessive and threatens to eclipse the comic love stories, never more so than at the very end of the film.  Once the Senator and his wife have clambered into the safety of the car that drives them away from South Beach, The Birdcage simply stops.  One earlier sequence has made especially clear that Mike Nichols’s priority lies in showcasing the talents of his cast rather than the nightclub’s drag acts:  Armand’s rehearsal of a doomed-to-fail dance number between Albert/Starina and a grumpy hunk partner called Celsius (Luca Tommassini) seems to be included chiefly in order for Robin Williams to go into (excellent) lightning impressions of famous choreographic styles – Bob Fosse, Martha Graham, Twyla Tharp, Michael Kidd, Madonna.  And while it’s true that the closing titles play over shots of Val and Barbara’s (Jewish-Christian) wedding ceremony, this is no more than a curtain call for the people we’ve been watching for the last two hours.  Fair enough, though:  everyone in The Birdcage deserves to take a bow.

    3 August 2023

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