Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Moolaadé / Senegal / 2004

NYFF COVERAGE – One may quite safely state that Ousmane Sembene’s Mooladé is among the most exuberant films ever made about female circumcision. Indeed, for a film that takes as its subject the slow march of progress in rural Africa, it is a surprisingly vitalizing piece of work, generously portraying the many social strata of a Senegalese village and the ways in which they balance Islamic tradition and innovation. Sembene’s film develops a subtle and sympathetic relation to its characters and their viewpoints, asserting the need for social progress in Africa without resorting to scare tactics, polemical bombast or stereotypes.

Moolaadé opens with four little girls who have fled the “purification” ritual and taken refuge at the home of Collé, whose first daughter died as a result of circumcision. A rare opponent of purification, Collé has insisted that her second daughter remain a bilakoro, or uncircumcised female, even though such women are disdained and considered undesirable by the wider community. The film’s title loosely translates as “protection,” but the term refers more specifically to that spirit or power which Collé invokes to protect the girls from the circumcision rite. In the community’s tradition, it is considered mortally dangerous to combat moolaadé, and the power can only be dispelled by the utterance of “the redemptive Word” by Collé herself.

Much of the film is structured around different interactions amongst the members of the community: the children’s confusion about the need for traditions, the women arguing for or against circumcision, the patriarchal elders reasserting these traditions and worrying over the corruptive influence of the world outside. This external force of progress is symbolized by the radios that the women listen to while working, and in an effort to protect the community’s traditions, the village elders confiscate these radios.

These issues of progress and tradition come to a head with the return of the village patriarch’s son, Ibrahima, from “France, where the money is printed.” Ibrahima returns home bearing money and gifts – a television, coffee pot and silk pajamas. Wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, he embodies the African continent’s furtive bids for growth and participation in a global economy. As he notes, “We cannot cut ourselves off from the progress of the world.” Ibrahima’s worldliness and optimism is thrown into relief by the cynicism and iconoclasm of the local traveling salesman, nicknamed Mercenaire, who sells rubbers, shoes and loaves of bread, while dispensing colorful aphorisms, like “Africa is a real bitch.” Mercenaire combats the traditions of the community, playfully seducing his female customers and comparing Ibrahima’s arranged marriage to his 12-year old cousin with pedophilia.

But Mercenaire’s jaded dismissal of tradition is surely more extreme than the film’s general tone, which seems to assert a respect for progress within tradition. Moolaadé endorses a kind of synthesis, symbolized by the film’s final edit: cutting from the spire of a mosque to a television antenna. And whereas many may find the film’s conclusion stirring and inspirational, it does not represent an overcoming of oppression, but rather a broadening of perspective. Crucially (and perhaps surprisingly, for some Western viewers), the issue of female circumcision is not simply one of a patriarchal society’s suppression of women’s rights. Indeed, the purification rite is performed by a group of women (the salandina) and is pervasively supported by the male and female traditionalists within the community. The achievement of Sembene’s film is to address a complex cultural dilemma, not through propaganda, but through dialogue. As Sembene himself has said:

For the Third World filmmaker, it is not a question of coming to overwhelm the people, because technical prowess is very easy, and after all, cinema, when you know it, is a very simple thing. It is a question of allowing the people to summon up their own history, to identify themselves with it. People must listen to what is in the film, and they must talk about it.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: New Yorker Films 35mm print
11 Oct 2004 9:08 PM | Submit Comment