April 14, 2022 1:55 pm
A film that is enveloping and light in tone but deep in content arrives in the hall, revealing for the Western audience and beyond. It is about A mother, a daughter by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, a leading figure in African cinema, born in Chad, who presented this feature film in competition at the last Cannes Film Festival.
And he finds correspondences, or reversals as in a mirror, with two titles that have recently arrived in the cinema and also presented at Cannes. With Between two worlds (Ouistreham), the new feature film by writer Emmanuel Carrère with Juliette Binoche, two transport cleaners take us to extreme situations. We wrote about it from Cannes. While with Paris, 13th Arr. (The Olympiads) Jacques Audiard, making an interethnic film about the new generations, creates an axiom between social, intimate and sexual relations. And here too we refer to the news from Cannes.
Net change of register
But let’s go back to Africa. It is the story – set in N’Djamena, the capital of Chad – of a young woman, Maria, who becomes pregnant with her, in a Muslim reality, and of her complex bond with her young mother, Amina. Amina is in fact a single mother and as such she is frowned upon: when she recites the prayers in the brotherhood of the Imam she remains isolated from the others, in her shadow. She approaches her only the imam himself who lectures her for not having participated in the morning prayer. And Maria immediately becomes rebellious with respect to traditions, to religion, because she decides to have an abortion driving Amina crazy: “I don’t care! It’s in my body, it’s my belly! ”. The rigid religious rules, the oppressive patriarchal culture, the desire for emancipation and freedom (including sexuality), excision, sexual violence, abortion. Many themes in a short film, serious and serious themes. Yet something else emerges.
The calm. The tone, indeed the tonality of the film. Since its inception, where we see Amina walking in the background, skirting the buildings on one side and the light green grass on the other. In the foreground, the flowing water of a small river and the delicate sound of it. You can easily guess that we are in the suburbs of a big city like N’Djamena. Then the woman arrives on the wide streets with an elevated road where people walk freely all around, in a pleasant anarchy: the noises of cars and mopeds take over. And even when he arrives at a shed to resell her objects, we hear, in addition to the vague noise of some moped speeding by, a constant and indefinite shouting, which reminds us of the almost dreamlike dimension we reach by lying on the beach and closing our eyes.
Later we will see the mother secretly following her daughter: from the small and delightful maze of houses surrounded by grass where the crowing of a rooster peeps out, the sudden shot on Amina’s face emerges from the corner of a wall: it is synchronic net change of sound register and startles at the return, more aggressive this time, of the almost tumultuous noises emanating from the great city arteries. In reality there is nothing terrible. It is more a matter of perception. If cinema is a look at the world, here it is more than ever and, moreover, in perfect synchrony with the sound. Intended as the sounds of life, indeed as life itself.
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, who has several major feature films to his credit, almost all of which premiered at Cannes – except for Daratt, the season of forgiveness presented in Venice in 2006 where it obtained the Special Jury Prize – often tells the collective under the prism of individuals and underwear. And with, so to speak, subdued, delicate tones. It is no less this film with which he tries his hand for the first time in telling female characters on which the entire narrative focuses. A mother and daughter of hers, in fact. But if the tones are delicate, if there is the pleasure of the representation of stillness, at times even of contemplation, if the light room almost floats in scrutinizing the rooms, the questions are nevertheless heavy, serious. The drama around the corner.
A real estate company
The dominant patriarchy and the Islamic religion that imposes it are both considered by the director as imported into a social and cultural body previously foreign to them and for Haroun they have ended up generating a “immobilized society”. Then, the graceful maze of narrow streets can also become a claustrophobic labyrinth where you can lose your soul perhaps by performing some rash action; tranquility, stillness, can be synonymous with swamp, with a stillness almost close to death. The question, however, seems to be the balance of things. It is truly remarkable how the director manages to give life to his female characters, not only Amina and Maria: the freshness and genuineness of the acting are perfectly allied to the expression of the most suffered feelings, always with a certain modesty, without ostentation. Yet the suffering seems great. The institutions, for one reason or another, are all hostile: the imam, the school that hunts Mary, the hospital where to practice abortion: how to break the movement of ineluctable predestination without incurring terrible sanctions? How to stop this false movement? False movement because in reality it is circular and which inevitably leads the follower back to the initial square, as in the game of the goose. Here is the dilemma.
But, underground, there is another world. It is an ancient world made up of solidarity, reciprocity, mutual aid: it is the languages of tradition and which gives the original title to the film. A tradition that is reinvented here, adapted to new needs, made up of little things said and unspoken, of small actions that are almost invisible but accumulated create an underground movement of possible change. Behind the stillness, behind the water just moved. A mother and her daughter, whose relationship calmly but firmly rebellious in growing soon takes on an equal dimension in parallel: they are a bit older sister and younger sister, they quarrel, but the love that unites them never fails, even when they words can hurt heavily: “I don’t want to become like you. Nobody respects you. I don’t want this life ”. Indeed, the bonds that Amina weaves at the same time manage to build new ones – the beautiful character of the doctor who tries to practice clandestine abortions wisely – and to rebuild the old ones, as with Amina’s sister, who in her time was afraid of being thrown out. from his father.
This film essentially about women and about women illustrates social dynamics by means of the relational dynamics between human beings but without didacticism, without rhetorical heaviness, and captures life in its naturalness, like a flow, like the water of a flowing river. , in its “while”. And consequently the plot is important and at the same time it is not. It is his doing that matters, to enchant and capture the viewer.
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun confesses that the film is also the fruit of the very vivid memory of the grandmother who raised him, a free and strong woman abandoned by her husband. And it is a portrait of today’s women in her country, including graduates and occupying positions of a certain importance, but often frowned upon because they are independent and unmarried. And then there are women far less rich and equally without husbands, because they are widows, divorced or abandoned, like those described. Women who do not shy away from both practical and “feminist” use of the tools offered by modernity, such as mobile phones. Here, unlike in many films by the great Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke, there is no alienation of the community conveyed by the compulsive purchase of objects characterized almost as a status symbol. Modernity finds its right balance with the ancient, the roots, the authenticity. With the languages. This is a mother and a daughter: a single organism in the social, a single seamless flow between the ancient and the modern.