Salon on Bamako
Beyond the Multiplex

By Andrew O'Hehir, February 12th, 2007

"How guilty is the Western world? The film "Bamako" reaches a verdict..."

BEYOND THE MULTIPLEX

How guilty is the Western world? The film "Bamako" reaches a verdict -- and Iraq vets share their thoughts. Plus: The hidden treasures in McSweeney's DVD magazine.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Feb. 8, 2007 | It's a week of riches here at Your Home for Thought-Provoking Entertainment (TM), what with the arrival of two of 2007's most-anticipated foreign films, and yet another reminder that there's a war going on over there, somewhere, which remains a political abstraction to most of us but is entirely too real to those sent to fight it.

First on the list is the Oscar-nominated German film "The Lives of Others," which I'll just bounce off briefly. (Stephanie Zacharek will review it on Friday.) As director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck observed during our phone interview last week, his movie is a huge long shot to win the foreign-language Oscar. London bookmakers, he says, are offering 7-to-1 odds for bets on his picture, while a winning $100 wager on.

So much for the racing form. The film itself is a compelling and complicated fable of heroism and tragedy, set in the mid-1980s in East Germany, when the power of the Stasi, that socialist paradise's notorious secret police force, was unchallenged. You don't need much background in German history or Marxist studies to appreciate the nuances and multiple layers of irony in "The Lives of Others," which combines a Cold War thriller, a love story and a Dostoevskian tale of sin and redemption. Go see it. I'll have more on the film, and my conversation with von Donnersmarck, during our Oscar-week coverage.

There's also a grim little documentary companion piece to von Donnersmarck's film opening this week at New York's Film Forum, and I'll get to that below. First let's move on to the week's other major foreign-language release. It's an African film called "Bamako," by the Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako (I covered it last fall at the New York Film Festival), that violates pretty much all the conventions of standard moviemaking. A defiantly political and borderline experimental work, it's definitely not for everybody. Those with the appetite for this kind of thing will find it to be a profound emotional and intellectual challenge, and one of the most original cinematic achievements of this decade.


Melé (Aïssa Maïga) in "Bamako"

"Bamako": The Western world goes on trial -- and Africa finds itself guilty

You can criticize "Bamako" for all sorts of reasons, but good luck finding any that it doesn't cover itself. Do you find this movie's central premise -- a trial in which African civil society accuses the Western world's major financial institutions of impoverishing and enslaving millions of Africans to pointless, dead-weight debt and disastrous neoliberal reforms -- boring and dogmatic? So do the guys playing dominoes in the square outside the Bamako, Mali, courtyard where the trial takes place. "How long is this going to last?" they groan, disconnecting the loudspeakers so they don't have to listen to their fellow Africans complain.

Do you think films should be entertaining, and avoid theoretical economic and political discussions? Well, "Bamako" also features a corrupt cop, a stolen gun and a mysterious murder. Then there's the sudden interruption of a violent mock-western called "Death in Timbuktu," starring Danny Glover (and several of Sissako's filmmaker friends), which is shown on Malian television, after a botched newscast, and briefly takes over "Bamako." Do you find the Africans' argument against market-based economic reforms simplistic, sentimental and anecdotal? So does the defense lawyer representing the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (played by real-life French attorney Roland Rappaport), who makes an eloquent closing argument.

One stream of "Bamako," without question, is a defiant and angry political screed. Sissako's parade of witnesses, who range from peasants and refugees to prominent African intellectuals, accuse the late capitalist world order of enforcing a deadly new form of colonialism on their continent. Public services have been destroyed, infant mortality has soared, and healthcare and education have all but evaporated, they tell us, all in the name of servicing an enormous debt that was squandered on counterproductive development projects or embezzled by corrupt local officials.

But this "trial," while conducted in deadly earnest -- and largely improvised by "actors" who are genuine lawyers and judges -- is at the same time an intentionally ludicrous spectacle. It's not happening in a courtroom but in a courtyard (a little joke, perhaps) of an ordinary house in Bamako, probably a middle-class dwelling by African standards. People who live there come and go, doing their best to ignore the robed judges and attorneys, the rows of somber-faced witnesses in folding chairs. Chickens and goats wander through. Children fetch water from the pump and women do laundry. The court must recess when a wedding party enters, complete with video cameraman and a woman in traditional dress who is paid to ululate a song of praise to the newlyweds.

At the beginning of each day's proceedings, Sissako's cameras, mikes and other equipment are clearly visible. Yet even as "Bamako" exposes its own artifice in classic Brechtian fashion, it also encloses this theatrical show-trial -- as the IMF/World Bank attorney laments, the deck is surely stacked against him -- in a low-key, naturalistic portrait of African life. Sissako captures numerous incidental scenes on the fringes of the trial, and there's also a kind of bracketing narrative about Melé (Aïssa Maïga), a beautiful, vain and hedonistic nightclub singer who lives in the compound and is drifting away from her long-suffering husband, Chaka (Tiécoura Traoré), for reasons we never completely understand.

By any logical assessment, this mixture of apparently incompatible ingredients should collapse into an incoherent hash. But "Bamako" is so ferociously intelligent and cannily constructed that its warring elements all support each other. As we watch Melé singing an infectious Afro-pop number in a half-empty nightclub, with tears streaming down her cheeks, she's not weeping just for the husband and child she may be abandoning. She's crying for the eviscerated society described by witness after witness at the near-comical trial. She's weeping along with the elderly peasant whose testimony is a chant of lament in a language no one in court can understand.

Everywhere "Bamako" has been shown, it has provoked panel discussions and debates, both formal and otherwise. I don't think one viewing is sufficient to appreciate the complexities of its argument, or the extent to which Sissako and his witnesses are judging African society for its corruption and amorality, its internalized racism and self-hatred. If there can be little doubt about the verdict Sissako expects in his court case, no viewer -- Western, African or otherwise -- will come out of "Bamako" unindicted. A barrel of laughs, this ain't. But it's a fearless high-wire act, grim and witty, confrontational and self-mocking. Its message may be dire, but "Bamako" is a feat of intellectual and cinematic daring that will leave your brain buzzing.

"Bamako" opens Feb. 14 at Film Forum in New York. Other cities should follow.

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