With his debut feature, Senegalese author and activist Ousmane Sembène fleshes out a ripped-from-the-headlines tragedy about a young woman from Dakar whose job in France isn't what she imagines.
I’m glad the Sight and Sound poll (and this feature) gave me the push to finally sit down and watch this stunning film. I, too, remember Ebert’s championing of Moolaadé when it came out and will likewise be seeing it and Sembène’s other films.
As for this one, one part that struck me was when the wife browbeats her husband about his drinking and he skulks off to the bedroom to rifle through his porn. Clearly, nothing he does satisfies her, either.
Such a great movie. Can’t pretend I’m an expert on Senegalese film but man that country seems to have such a rich output. Also love how every film partially set in Dakar has such an interesting relationship (plot-wise and visual-wise) to the sea. I’m thinking of course about Black Girl, Touki Bouki, and the recent Atlantics.
Black Girl is a pretty raw film, very much a debut feature in feel. It has some good stuff but it would be my poster child for movies that show up on lists like this simply to fulfill geographic distribution desires. If you actually think Black Girl is better than all but 94 movies ever made, right on good for you, but I think it's much more a solid three star films elevated by WHO made it rather than WHAT it accomplishes as a film. Which seems to be more and more the desire of list-makers and cinephiles, but it bothers me. Do you actually think Black Girl is better than every movie Steven Spielberg ever made?
I watched this recently because of the Sight & Sound poll, knowing nothing about it, so Diouana dying by suicide was shocking, though not really surprising. It's not a horror film by any conventional definition of the term, but it's certainly horrifying, and the banality of that horror makes it all the worse. Some of the film's greatness comes because Monsieur and Madame don't have any sense of how terrible they are.
In the beginning I thought I was getting something like Cléo from 5 to 7, and it turned out more like Rosemary's Baby.
If people like the exploited migrant worker story genre, I will say there was a movie I was shown in high school decades ago, El Norte, that recently got a criterion release. Have I gone back and rewatched it? No, but Black Girl really did make me think of it, and it getting a criterion release makes me think it's probably of good quality (I don't trust my high school memory of it).
The skewering of the "enlightened" French upper class in this and the talk of the mask is making me think of the black face scene in Antonioni's L'Eclisse. A scene that, partly because I never research things, can never decide if Antonioni is also skewering the hypocrisy of the upper class or unintentionally depicting it by displaying his own.
I guess even if it's the latter, it can be read as unintentionally being the former for my enjoyment of the film.
I just watched this yesterday, thanks to its appearance here, as well as in Filmspotting's recent African Cinema marathon. What a direct, devastating movie.
There's one element I'd like to dive a little further into, since the scene confused me a little. When Monsieur reads the letter from her mother, Diouana rejects it, ripping it up and saying her mother didn't write it. And I can see her having that reaction: the letter is difficult to hear, the lack of privacy she has is terrible, and Monsieur's starting to write back without so much as asking her robs her of her autonomy. And when we see Diouana's mother at the end, she doesn't seem ill. And yet what would Monsieur and Madame have to gain by faking this letter? Was it indeed faked by them? There's a man we see early on, who seems to be the neighborhood's professional letter writer -- could he have faked it, or could someone else have faked it through him?
I get the emotions of the scene, and it's harsh, blunt tone. But I'm unclear about the origins of the letter itself. Can anyone shed some light on this for me?
I’m glad the Sight and Sound poll (and this feature) gave me the push to finally sit down and watch this stunning film. I, too, remember Ebert’s championing of Moolaadé when it came out and will likewise be seeing it and Sembène’s other films.
As for this one, one part that struck me was when the wife browbeats her husband about his drinking and he skulks off to the bedroom to rifle through his porn. Clearly, nothing he does satisfies her, either.
Such a great movie. Can’t pretend I’m an expert on Senegalese film but man that country seems to have such a rich output. Also love how every film partially set in Dakar has such an interesting relationship (plot-wise and visual-wise) to the sea. I’m thinking of course about Black Girl, Touki Bouki, and the recent Atlantics.
Black Girl is a pretty raw film, very much a debut feature in feel. It has some good stuff but it would be my poster child for movies that show up on lists like this simply to fulfill geographic distribution desires. If you actually think Black Girl is better than all but 94 movies ever made, right on good for you, but I think it's much more a solid three star films elevated by WHO made it rather than WHAT it accomplishes as a film. Which seems to be more and more the desire of list-makers and cinephiles, but it bothers me. Do you actually think Black Girl is better than every movie Steven Spielberg ever made?
I watched this recently because of the Sight & Sound poll, knowing nothing about it, so Diouana dying by suicide was shocking, though not really surprising. It's not a horror film by any conventional definition of the term, but it's certainly horrifying, and the banality of that horror makes it all the worse. Some of the film's greatness comes because Monsieur and Madame don't have any sense of how terrible they are.
In the beginning I thought I was getting something like Cléo from 5 to 7, and it turned out more like Rosemary's Baby.
If people like the exploited migrant worker story genre, I will say there was a movie I was shown in high school decades ago, El Norte, that recently got a criterion release. Have I gone back and rewatched it? No, but Black Girl really did make me think of it, and it getting a criterion release makes me think it's probably of good quality (I don't trust my high school memory of it).
The skewering of the "enlightened" French upper class in this and the talk of the mask is making me think of the black face scene in Antonioni's L'Eclisse. A scene that, partly because I never research things, can never decide if Antonioni is also skewering the hypocrisy of the upper class or unintentionally depicting it by displaying his own.
I guess even if it's the latter, it can be read as unintentionally being the former for my enjoyment of the film.
I just watched this yesterday, thanks to its appearance here, as well as in Filmspotting's recent African Cinema marathon. What a direct, devastating movie.
There's one element I'd like to dive a little further into, since the scene confused me a little. When Monsieur reads the letter from her mother, Diouana rejects it, ripping it up and saying her mother didn't write it. And I can see her having that reaction: the letter is difficult to hear, the lack of privacy she has is terrible, and Monsieur's starting to write back without so much as asking her robs her of her autonomy. And when we see Diouana's mother at the end, she doesn't seem ill. And yet what would Monsieur and Madame have to gain by faking this letter? Was it indeed faked by them? There's a man we see early on, who seems to be the neighborhood's professional letter writer -- could he have faked it, or could someone else have faked it through him?
I get the emotions of the scene, and it's harsh, blunt tone. But I'm unclear about the origins of the letter itself. Can anyone shed some light on this for me?