Dir.
Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006, Mali, 117 mins
Cast: Aissa Maiga, Tiecoura Traore, Helene Diarra
Review by Mike Bartlett
Bamako opens with a man walking through an African village
in the twilight hours of dawn or dusk – it's not clear
which. And the image is correspondingly grainy – shot
on 16mm, it becomes a blur of light and shadow, a dog barely
glimpsed in the darkness of a phone booth. This graininess
is a quality carried throughout the film, not only in the
visuals, but in the director's whole approach to the subject
matter.
The concept behind Bamako is just
beautiful – mount
a trial of the World Bank in the courtyard of an ordinary
Malian village (apparently, Sissako's own birthplace). That
way, the filmmaker can present a considered argument on how
Western nations have helped exacerbate African poverty, with
the human victims of their methods on hand to provide a specific
context. On paper, it looks like the perfect antidote to
the current raft of films examining African problems through
white men's eyes – Shooting Dogs, The Constant Gardener,
The Last King of Scotland. But in practice, it just doesn't
work.
Sissako's problem is that, in narrative
as in photography, little is distinct or properly defined.
The trial itself has an impressive cast of witnesses – writers, politicians,
lawyers – but they barely get to offer more than the
customary rhetoric. The occasional fact whizzes by – the
massive damage wrought by Structural Adjustment Policies,
the way privatisation has impacted on national railways – but
none of these are explained fully, so the audience (particularly
the Western audience) have no clear idea of what specifically
is being railed against. The high point of the film is when
an elderly farmer launches into an extraordinary song/rant
of despair, which, left unsubtitled, should act as a shockingly
pure “statement” of truth, an inarticulate voice
from the heart as opposed to precise but jaundiced legalese.
But because the trial has been so much unfocused windbaggery,
there is not enough contrast for the moment to stand out.
Similarly, the portrait of everyday
life around the hearing merely adds up to a series of vignettes.
The pomposity of the court is often marvellously undercut
by the appearance of a semi-dressed woman coming back from
a wash, but the woman in question, like her neighbours,
never evolves into a fully-rounded character. A man is
dying of cholera – but
who is he, where does he fit in? Without more background,
his fate need be no more significant to the trial's case
than the difficulties faced by the security guard in keeping
out unwanted onlookers. Sissako does have the courage to
show that the political arguments are sometimes as foreign
to Africans as to their Western counterparts – one
man switches off his radio saying, “This trial is getting
a little annoying” – but there's too few such
instances where the characters become real, living beings.
The problem, then, is that Bamako is neither one thing or
the other. Sissako would have been better off either a) making
a courtroom drama, where the cut-and-thrust of testimony
and cross-examination could be offset by the unusual setting,
or b) making a slice-of-life portrait of the village with
the trial in the background acting as ironic counterpoint.
But he's tried to meld the two and only come up with the
worst of both worlds. The resultant film feels clumsy and
awkward, with too many ideas betrayed by indecisive execution. |
