Metacritic-Rezensionen

Mandabi features an excellent performance from Guèye, who is innocent and culpable all at once. This is gentle, walking-pace cinema that leads us by the hand from vignette to vignette, from scene to scene, presented to us with ingenuous simplicity and calm.

Mandabi’s playful grammar and arresting camerawork are as exciting and politically charged as anything that emerged from the contemporaneous Nouvelle Vague.

As a comedy dealing with life's miseries, it displays a controlled sophistication in the telling that gives it a feeling of almost classic directness and simplicity.

Sembène looks ruefully yet tenderly at the ruses and wiles of the poor, whose desperate struggles—with the authorities and with one another—distract them from political revolt.

Sembène achieves this balance of tone with a mix of absurd and biting dialogue and a modest mise en scène.

Through it all Sembène maintains a steady, humanist touch.

A keen satire, MANDABI is not only Sembene's first comedy and first film in color, but also his first in Wolof, the language spoken by most Senegalese people. Its critique of a postcolonial state is much more narrowly focused than those of his earlier short films, and, as the first Senegalese film to be distributed commercially in Senegal, it more than got its point across.

This wryly mordant film achieved many firsts for the illustrious father of African cinema.

Honest but stupid. [19 Mar 1970, p.54]