Touki Bouki Review
By: T.J. “white women with their diseases” Mulligan
Everybody’s got their story to tell. This mantra extends to people of all walks of life, from all cultures. Throughout history people have attempted to not only get their specific stories and experiences out into the world, but also to tell said stories in manners unique to their ways of life. Medieval England used lyrical poetry, ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphics, Native Americans used oral traditions. As time passed and technology developed, film eventually became a mainstream-accepted way of telling stories not only through the words spoken, but through images and music as well. While telling a visual story was made easier, telling it in a way that is unique to specific cultures or peoples became the next issue. Of course Hollywood set the standard, but the French followed with surrealism, Italians with neorealism and so on. This, however, still left many parts of the world, including Africa, without a type of cinema to specifically call their own. Enter Djibril Dio Mambety and his 1973 film Touki Bouki. Heralded as one of the first uniquely African feature films, it borrows loosely from other cinematic conventions to create a style that is certainly all it’s own.
Touki Bouki is the story of Anta (Mareme Niang) and Mory (Magaye Niang), two young lovers living in Senegal with dreams of moving on to bigger and better things in Paris, France. After finally deciding that they need to make their dreams a reality, the two begin conning and stealing their way into gaining entrance onto a ship destined for France. Along the way they run into their fair share of trouble as they try to avoid not only the law but the other criminal characters whom they’ve swindled.
The very first line of actual diegetic dialogue is “shit”, which should have clued me into what I had to look forward to for the rest of the film (I realize this is nothing more than a cheap shot but I had to take it). The film has many surrealist moments in it (there are at least three instances of actual animal sacrifices being portrayed in graphic detail, i.e.: animals were DEFINITELY harmed in the making of this picture) but even that quality cannot explain the disjointedness with which the story is told. Many events that take place at different points in the film do so without any clear reason or ever coming to a resolution, which isn’t surreal, it’s just illogical. For the first half of the movie I believed I was watching events that were being played out of order for storytelling purposes, only to find out that these weren’t out of order, it was just sloppy storytelling. The characters have too many flaws to be redeemable or likable and, thus, caused me to not care about what happens to them ultimately. As well, some of the music repeats throughout which, if used correctly, can work to call back to previous scenes or points in the story, but here simply adds to the annoyance (the “Paris, Paris, Paris” song in the trailer above loops and reappears so much that I had that awful tune stuck in my head for 2 days).
I can’t “shit” all over this film, though: it’s not without it’s charm. The feel of the film is unlike any I had experienced before, which is certainly one of the points Diop Mambety was trying to accomplish. The landscape of both the city and countryside in and around Senegal is beautifully represented and the images of Anta and Mory, two against the world, on their motorcycle, begin to pull the viewer in from time to time, but those moments are too few and far between. One aspect I absolutely adored from this film is the mixture of different sound and visual cues, such as the cackling laughter of Anta’s mother mixed with shots of vultures flying above and the ship’s horn mixed with footage of a cow bleating. This is a prime example or how surrealist elements can richly add to a film.
It’s hard to fault a film that was made during a time when the county of it’s origin was still trying to find it’s cinematic path, but all I can do is take the film at face value. This movie does have a lot going for it, unfortunately it’s mostly bad.
I give Touki Bouki 2 trunk skulls out of 5.
