#66: ‘Touki Bouki’: The Reveal discusses all 100 of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time

Djibril Diop Mambéty's film offers a restless, darkly funny, determinedly weird twist on the lovers-on-the-run story that doubles as look at Senegal at a turning point in its history.

On December 1st, 2022, Sight & Sound magazine published “The Greatest Films of All Time,” a poll that’s been updated every 10 years since Bicycle Thieves topped the list in 1952. It is the closest thing movies have to a canon, with each edition reflecting the evolving taste of critics and changes in the culture at large. It’s also a nice checklist of essential cinema. Over the course of many weeks, months, and (likely) years, we’re running through the ranked list in reverse order and digging into the films as deep as we can. We hope you will take this journey with us.

Touki Bouki (1973)
Dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty
Ranking: #66
Previous rankings: #93 (2012)

Premise: In the Senegalese capital of Dakar, two young lovers dream of leaving and starting a new life in Paris. Mory (Magaye Niang) is a cowherd who lives on the city’s outskirts and rides a motorcycle with the skull of a zebu mounted between its handlebars. Anta (Mareme Niang) is a student whose relationship with Mory is viewed with suspicion by her revolutionary classmates. As the two attempt various schemes, the line dividing reality and their fantasies begins to thin.

Keith: Before we get into Touki Bouki, it might be good to take a moment to consider the journey it’s had over the past couple of decades. It would be unfair to say director Djibril Diop Mambéty died in obscurity in 1998 at the age of 53. He was well-known in world cinema circles and considered an important figure in African filmmaking, but Touki Bouki, his best-known film, wasn’t exactly a film canon staple. The 21st century push to expand the canon, and to acknowledge contributions outside parts of the world whose contributions have gone under-considered, as has a 2008 restoration as part of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project. By the time of the 2012 poll, it landed in the #93 spot. It rose even higher in 2022. Put another way: twenty years ago, it didn’t seem like the sort of movie that could inspire the visuals used to promote a Beyoncé and Jay-Z tour, as it did in 2018.

That homage / appropriation / whatever you want to call it says a lot about Touki Bouki. Here are two of the biggest stars of their era with an unimaginable amount of money at their disposal, but they’re borrowing from the work of a 28-year-old self-taught filmmaker from Senegal and a decades-old movie he shot for $30,000. Touki Bouki is filled with wild ideas and memorable images, which might also be the best explanation for its ascent. Never mind the trends that have changed how we look at the canon. This is a film that can’t be contained.

Here’s where I admit that I’d never seen it before watching it for our discussion, though. (Part of why I wanted to do this project is to address some of my own blind spots and this is one of them.) It took me a moment to find my footing with the film, at least in part because it opens with a bunch of long, graphic scenes inside a slaughterhouse that I’ll have to confess to watching out of the corner of my eye, just as I did some later scenes of goat butchery. But in the context of the film, those play a bit like a gauntlet being thrown down. Mambéty is not interested in coddling viewers.

But as provocative as it can be, Touki Bouki isn’t just about shock value. It’s more darkly humorous than confrontational as it follows Mory and Anta in their attempts to put Dakar behind them for life in Paris. Their escape attempts double as a tour of a city in which the modern and traditional live side-by-side and the legacy of colonialism remains evident over a decade after Senegalese independence. Mory’s skull-outfitted motorcycle is just one item that welds together those seemingly contradictory elements.

Touki Bouki offers little in the way of plot so it’s tough to know where to start talking about it. Maybe we should start with its protagonists. Who are Anta and Mory? Both want to leave, but do they want to leave for the same reasons? And, with full acknowledgement that I’m not an expert on Senegalese history, are they driven by a universal spirit of youth rebellion, the specifics of their circumstances, or some combination of the two?

Scott: I’m going to pull out my “Get Out Word Jail Free” card and use the dreaded word “iconic” to describe the image of Mory and Anta on the back of that horn-mounted motorcycle, which has become as much a defining picture of youthful rebellion as Peter Fonda astride that red-white-and-blue hog in Easy Rider. In fact, given how much Touki Bouki owes to Mambéty’s engagement to the French New Wave, particularly Jean-Luc Godard, it seems possible that the chauffeured red-white-and-blue car that appears late in the film is deliberately evoking the iconography of that cultural touchstone, too. Mambéty is hailed as a self-taught filmmaker and the film’s rough-around-the-edge precociousness is a large part of its appeal. But it’s also plain that he was an A + student of cinema.

Touki Bouki is the second and highest-ranked African film in the Sight and Sound Top 100, with Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl among the first films we discussed for this project when we started it. (It was in a multiway tie for #95.) It is also one of the coolest films on the list, right up there with Chungking Express, because the lead actors are so striking as beautiful rebels and because its revolutionary sentiments are smuggled through the playful use of music, comedy, and experimental technique. As much as you might consider Mambéty a neophyte behind the camera, it’s a liability that he turns into an asset: He doesn’t have to play by the rules any more than Mory and Anta do, so he’s free to follow his impulses and allow the film to wander the aesthetic countryside.

The contrast with Sembène on this list is really useful, because both Black Girl and Touki Bouki are Senegalese films that grapple with French colonialism and its effect on characters who share a profound desire to leave Dakar for France. In Black Girl, we can see the distance between that desire and actual reality of being in the French Riviera for a young woman who takes a nanny job and winds up trapped in her employers’ apartment, only experiencing the beauty of her surroundings from the balcony window. Mory and Anta never actually achieve their dream of getting to Paris—Anta seems to be on her way in the closing moments—but it seems likely that Mambéty would be as pessimistic as Sembène in predicting what they might find there. Mory’s fantasies of returning to Dakar as a rich man parading down the street with Anta, both dressed to the nines, are comically far-fetched. The Paris of the oft-repeated Joséphine Baker’s “Paris, Paris, Paris” is so romantic as an idea that the city itself would never live up to their expectations of it.

But the contrast in style between Sembène and Mambéty couldn’t be plainer, which has really worked in Mambéty’s favor as far as the legacy of Touki Bouki is concerned. In his brief introduction to the film as part of the World Cinema collection—and never underestimate the impact its presence in Volume One had in continuing to boost its reputation—Scorsese refers to Sembène as “the godfather” of African cinema, and the slow austerity of his style seems widely influential, at least among the handful of classic films I’ve seen from the continent. Though the two seem to share broad revolutionary politics, there’s a formal polish to Black Girl that Touki Bouki doesn’t share, despite the former being Sembène’s directorial debut. Sembène creates a situation where the audience suffocates within the same oppressive interiors as his protagonist; Mambéty does the opposite, keeping his lovers outside and on the lam.

And so to circle all the way back to your original question about who Mory and Anta are, I do tend to think of them more as archetypes than specific people, representing a rebel spirit that Mambéty is seeking to channel here. You ask whether I think they might have different reasons for wanting to leave, which makes me suspect that you do see their motives as out of alignment. I’m curious why you think so, given how much they operate as a team. Perhaps it has something to do with their backgrounds, with Anta the quiet, glamorous, intellectual university student and Mory the rough hewn cowherd. But functionally, they are united in trying to pull off multiple schemes in getting the money to leave the country, though I suppose it’s Mory who’s the most assertive in taking action. So enlighten me, Keith: What’s your read on them as individuals?

I haven’t really gotten into the style of the film, which is really exciting, so maybe you can get us started on that, Keith. What did you make of Mambéty’s way of mingling naturalism with fantasy and the increasingly blurry lines between the two? And what did you think of the soundtrack, which not only has some notable songs, but is also aggressively discordant at times.

Keith: I think you’re right in noting that they work well as a team and that they’re as much archetypes as characters. But I keep getting stuck on the fact that their paths ultimately diverge. Anta leaves and Mory stays. I can’t imagine their paths crossing again, which suggests to me that Anta was always more committed to leaving than her partner. We don’t really get access to either character’s interior life beyond what becomes visualized on screen, so we can only judge from their actions. Is there commentary in the fact that the character most directly involved in revolutionary Senegalese politics gets out at the first opportunity? Maybe. Touki Bouki’s student revolutionaries aren’t exactly spared as targets of Mambéty’s satire, though, and Anta isn’t exactly in good standing with them thanks to her relationship with Mory, which feels like a comment on their commitment to elevating the status of everyday people.

That our two protagonists each go their own way seems significant, though I’m not sure I can pin down exactly why. But it’s probably worth noting that Mambéty, who undoubtedly could have left, remained in Senegal. (I’d love your thoughts on why Mory stays. It follows an announcement calling for someone named “Mr. Diop,” but I don’t think we ever learn Mory’s last name, do we?)

As for the style, it’s disorienting and, after the film (mostly) gets beyond the abattoir scenes, pretty thrilling. (Sorry to dwell on that but I had a really hard time with them.) The French New Wave is obviously an influence, particularly Godard, but Mambéty’s biggest inspiration, as you suggest, is the realization that there are no rules you have to follow when making a movie. Moments get repeated in ways that make the chronology fuzzy. Scenes set in Mory’s neighborhood that are filled with the nuts-and-bolts of how the marketplace works (a mix of credit and yelling) live side-by-side with elements like the pelt-wearing man who lives in a tree and eventually crashes Mory’s motorcycle. (I read that as a commentary on Tarzan and Western notions of Africa, but that might just be my own particular lens.) It’s wild. In his essay for the Criterion edition, critic Richard Porton uses the term “syncretic,” which seems apt. Mambéty is pulling together all the seemingly incompatible pieces that make up Senegalese culture into something like a cohesive vision of the world.

Which isn’t the same as a peaceful vision of the world, as the soundtrack suggests. Mambéty uses Baker’s “Paris, Paris” to maddening effect, in part because he keeps playing the same section over and over again and letting the pieces overlap. This is 1973! Jamaican producers had started using tape loops and Steve Reich had made some of his phase pieces, but had anyone attempted anything like this for a movie soundtrack? (Probably, as I’m sure our readers will let me know. But nothing really comes to mind.)

We should probably dig into some of the film’s individual scenes. I keep thinking about the robbery scene, where Mory leaves the home of the wealthy Charlie (Ousseynou Diop) with a bunch of fancy clothes as Charlie tries to lure Mory into the shower with him. It’s funny in part because the “seduction” is so one-sided and poorly executed. Mory remains stone-

faced and not the least bit flirtatious as Charlie just repeats the same entreaty over and over again while seemingly not even noticing that he’s not making any progress. Mory takes his time packing up the valuables then makes a clumsy escape, but there’s never really any sense he’s in danger. They leave with Charlie’s stars-and-stripes car and his driver. It feels consciously removed from the language of a thrilling movie crime scene, which might be another sign of Godard’s image but, as with the rest of Touki Bouki, Mambéty puts his own spin on it.

Scott, what moments stand out for you? And do you feel like all these disparate elements cohere into a complete vision? (That’s a bit of a leading question. I say “yes” because the wild contrasts feel like they are the vision of a world in which Pepsi ads line the same streets traveled by herds of cattle on the way to be killed.)

Scott: First of all, I’m very sorry you’ve been exposed once again to animals coming to real harm in a movie on this list—was this be better or worse for you than the cat torture in Sátántángo?—and I’m relieved that other great films infamous for depicting (or perpetrating) such violence, like Luis Buñuel’s Land Without Bread or Rainer Werner Fassbender’s In a Year of 13 Moons, did not get enough support to make the Top 100. The scenes of slaughter in Touki Bouki are indeed jarring and disturbing but entirely in keeping with the discordant quality of the rest of the film, which juxtaposes sounds and images that don’t fit neatly together and are often confrontational. Here it’s a reminder that the tranquil images of Mory and others herding cattle in the countryside ultimately lead both the cattle and the herders to a, let’s say, less tranquil destination. Rural life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be in Senegal.

Neither is urban life. Touki Bouki is full of fantasy and wild discursions, but it’s also as committed as Black Girl to showing how people actually live in Dakar. Mambéty’s camera takes in the vast expanse of impoverished neighborhoods, including one memorable shot from a bridge leading into one of them, and he notes the physical labor involved in residents hauling large buckets of water home on their heads. This is a hard life that Mory longs to escape by any means necessary, whether through a quick fortune in three-card monte or a robbery scheme like his attempt to knock off a wrestling arena. (That he and Anta make their getaway with the trunk that doesn’t contain any cash presages the hard luck that greets them at the port later on.) Mambéty may not be as strictly interested in social realism as Ousmane Sembène, but his film is nonetheless grounded in the same simple dreams of have-not characters. The French have it better. Maybe they can too.

To go back to your reading of the end of the film, narrative clarity isn’t one of Mambéty’s strong suits (or interests, really), but I think the announcement on board the ship was an indicator that Mory was about to get caught, so he fled away from the port, leaving his lover to make the journey to France alone. That’s another lovers-on-the-lam trope: Eventually the couple either dies in a blaze of gunfire or separates forever. There was never going to be a scenario where Mory’s fantasies ever align with reality—and it would frankly be less romantic anyway for this passion not to be doomed. (Though “Passion” isn’t quite the word I’d use with respect to Anta, who seems to fit more in the Godard/Anna Karina mold of a beautiful object of desire with an enigmatic face and unknowable feelings.)

As chaotic as the closing stretch gets, it also has some of my favorite moments in the film. Mory having to abandon the ship and return to the city, only to find his beloved motorcycle in ruins after it was stolen and crashed, is a sad fate, made sadder by Mambéty returning to the blissful, post-coital image of Mory and Anta on a seaside cliff with the bike alongside them. I’m also struck by how much Mambéty lingers on the shot of a small sailboat that follows Anta's large passenger ship out of the pier and seemingly to the same destination, because that’s a different kind of immigrant journey that’s being undertaken. The passenger ship is certain to make it to France, but the ocean can swallow up other desperate souls who take to the seas in search of a better life. It seems significant to me that Mambéty would take time to acknowledge them, too.

One other notable scene that we haven’t discussed is one where the well-to-do European passengers on the ship with Anta are casually discussing their thoughts on Senegal and other topics. One complains about the country being “barren” with nothing to buy while another grouses about how African art lacks refinement. (I remember again how the French couple in Black Girl prominently display African art on their walls, which feels almost hostile in its celebration of the culture.) If there was ever any doubt about Mambéty’s feelings for French colonialists and tourists, that scene firmly lays them to rest. Mory and Anta may aspire to their wealth and fashion, but the film holds white Europeans in contempt.

Still, all this talk about dashed dreams, colonial legacy, and the everyday lives of penniless Senegalese like Mory obscures the fundamental truth that Touki Bouki is a fun movie, carrying much of the playfulness and cultural commentary that audiences loved to see from Godard during his prime years. Mambéty was defying conventional wisdom over what to expect from African cinema by making a movie as free as Mory cruising around Dakar on his motorcycle or indulging in a whimsical bit of fantasy. We can also appreciate it as a zesty piece of fusion cuisine for our cinematic diet, merging the culture and tradition of African film with a French-inspired sensibility. Bon appétit!

Any further thoughts on this one, Keith? Touki Bouki was the first film, at #66, that stood all by itself in the ranking, but now we’re back to a three-way tie for #63, where three stone-cold classics are all knotted up. What’s next?

Keith: Thanks for clarifying that plot point, though I do kind of like keeping a bit of ambiguity in the mix. Maybe it’s the announcement that sends Mory running. Maybe it’s something else. Not everyone gets to leave and maybe not everyone is supposed to.

I believe I hear the sound of a zither in the distance, which can only mean one thing: We’re on our way to Vienna for Carol Reed’s The Third Man, a tale of post-war deception, long shadows, and cuckoo clocks. We hope you’ll join us.

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