Touki Bouki

Finally tracked this 1973 film down after watching and enjoying "Hyenas" by the same director earlier this year. Purportedly, "Hyenas" was the sequel to this, but that might be more in an emotional sense, as this film is vibrant with youthful desire, especially desire to flee the motherland of Senegal, while in "Hyenas" a bewitching/besmirched woman returns to Senegal after decades of being abroad.

Youth is what drives "Touki Bouki" - a mismatched couple of Mory and Anta, full of big dreams lacking even the smallest details. Their crime spree is more innocent than Bonnie and Clyde, or Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers." But there is that sort of recklessness that propels them from scene to scene.

And there is youth behind the camera as well, although his brother talks about the director's scripting ability in the bonus scenes, much of the film has a raw improvised flair to it. Capture an animal being slaughtered, work in some three-card monte, dig up some gris-gris by the shore, include lots of street and road life, Tarzan in a tree and a wicked knife bearing crazy lady and a skull in a treasure chest.

Most of the crimes and dreams fall short, but finally a trip to an ocean-side pool leads to a clothes-make-the-man-and-woman fantasy flight for paradise. Or at least Paris, Paris, Paris (noticed the cast notes highlights Josephine Baker for her singing in this, she an emblem for fleeing an unappreciative if not hostile homeland ).

Are there elements here of class divide, of colonialism and racism, sure. Toss in some interesting angles on sex, Anta has a defiant androgeny that I bet captivated the director. She might make a modern-day heroine/hero for many. It's that youthful frustration with problems a budding adult senses have been around too long, but somehow s/he feels they can, they must overcome.

Yet even as you dream of the refined ocean liner outbound, you see the rotting husk of a ship offshore.

The plot is a tad thinner here than in "Hyenas" but what was interesting was the choice Mory makes at the end, granted a bit obfuscated by that strange Tarzan-esque interference.

Ultimately the film captured the intoxicating chaos of youth, while delivering a more subtle sobering statement about how one's own liberty is enmeshed in one's surroundings, even when those surroundings feel as though they conspire against one.

A dilemma, with horns.

The first important thing to say is that I hope that no animals are ill treated or killed in the course of filming which is unacceptable and strictly forbidden. The images are powerful indeed in terms of scenes, surroundings and people's faces, bodies, expressions and behaviours. The action takes place in Senegal and the story is simple and well shown. A cow herd and a university student are longing to leave Senegal and emigrate to Paris. They try to succed in that by doing a lot of things including stealing money from other people to pay for a ship travel to France. Through it we see and are aware of the life and usages of the Sebegalese lower social class. All well filmed, directed and acted. And last but not least we listen on the background part of a Parisian song by the beautiful voice of Josephine Baker.

I went to the London Film Festival in October 2008 to watch a film from the past, a "Treasure from the Archive". However whilst Touki Bouki was made over 35 years ago it still remains incredibly relevant. Young Africans still drown trying to cross the Straits of Gibraltar to Europe every day. That's what this film is about, the desperation of ordinary Africans (specifically from a Senegalese perspective) yearning to find prosperity and stability. It's one of those films I would class as a "scream of despair". Even if there are some very funny scenes, these scenes are like the scenes of humour that Ford would inject into his Westerns to mollify audience gloom. It would not surprise me if that were a direct influence, but if he wasn't cine-literate, then Djibril must rank as the most precocious director of all time.

The bare bones of the plot of the film concerns Mory, who is a sometime cattle herder, and Anta his girlfriend who is a university student. This especially winsome couple want desperately to escape to Europe. Mory is the object of ridicule in his community, intelligent, but useless and uppity, whilst Anta's university is no real safe-haven of learning, what with it being full of decadent revolutionaries (not an oxymoron). Both yearn to live in France.

As close to a true narrative as we get is that they go to a wrestling match and attempt to steal the stadium's cash box. There are two boxes, a yellow one and a blue one, they can't take both and aren't sure which one holds the loot. They take the blue one and when they get to their deserted, ruined, ex-colonial bunker hideout realise that it is filled with Voodoo craziness, runes and skulls and such. This for me is high Surrealism.

Plan B is to steal clothes, money, and a car off a rich idler who lives in a seaside villa surrounded by catamites. Plan B is successful, exeunt Mory and Anta pursued by the lo (sic).

Dressed as highfalutin dandies they revisit Mory's community driving in a stars-and-stripes festooned car where they are treated as a Lord and his Lady. Whether this is actual plotting or wish-fulfilment dreaming is left up to the viewer to decide.

After Fellinian parades of the mind the story returns to earth with a bump as Mory and Anta reach a port and try to escape to France.

One thing that stands out in the film is the anti-French criticism. The French bourgeois who make their living in Senegal are shown as treating Senegalese as some sort of bonobo-child chimeras. Also there is the aforementioned wrestling match, which is a "charity" event organised to raise money to build a statue of General de Gaulle (the height of absurdism?). This is also internally-driven criticism as the organisers are chiefs of a Senegalese tribe.

The film is ambivalent about life in Senegal, whilst Mory and Anta yearn to leave, Mambéty also shows us beautiful scenes of daily life in Senegal, and the humour of the populace. One part for me stands out, a parade of Senegalese carrying water on their heads in semi-transparent plastic buckets, the sunlight shining through the buckets transforms them into preternatural magic lanterns, the framing is exquisite, the camerashot is filled with green and blue corruscation. The point is that this guy Mambéty is not some sort of amateur who is esteemed out of political correctness, this guy is a force of nature, a director whose capability of expression is really begging to be called primus inter pares when compared to the likes of Parajanov and Bunuel.

One strong warning is that this movie contains scenes of cattle being slaughtered both in abbatoirs and outside of them, right at the start of the film. Really gruesome in the extreme, and far more graphic for example than the familiar scene of an ox being slaughtered in Apocalypse Now. The point of it is metaphorical, young African men are treated as no less than cattle to be slaughtered, fodder for the consumer games of power structures, ultimately commoditised.

Mory, a cowherd, and Anta, a university student, try to make money in order to go to Paris and leave their boring past behind.

This film looks great and is just very interesting from the whole clash of cultures perspective. You have some African tradition here, and mixed in with that you have some Muslim practices. I am no expert, but I suspect Islam in Senegal is much different than in the Middle East. It's an interesting blend. And then, of course, you have the modern world of France, which is different from either of those cultures.

What may strike viewers the most, especially because it happens so early in the film (and is repeated later), is the slaughter of the cattle. Whether the methods shown are humane or not, I have no idea. But they look brutal, and to the modern world it may be a shock to see something that has become so far removed from our everyday life. Now, food is food, and we rarely see that once upon a time it was a living thing.

Disorienting and at times even a bit schizophrenic, this is an extraordinarily vibrant, pulsating, and eccentric film. Comparisons to the anarchic, jumpy, free-associative style of the French New Wavers are not far off, but there's something much more erotic and carnal in the film's playfulness.

The story of self-assured college beauty Anta and her fella - Mory the motorcycle-riding herdsman - starts in Dakar and wistfully wanders toward Paris, the seemingly unattainable city of their dreams. Their get-rich-quick schemes and the breezy, colorful manner in which they unfold are funny and inspired.

Along the way, there are sequences of both utter hilarity and genuine depth, although the film does sometimes seem unsure of its many potentially-symbolic representations. But the stylistic narrative and experimental technical aspects are so full of ideas that talk of the film's minor weaknesses seems trivial.

The soundtrack is outstanding, full of syncopation and polyrhythms pacing the film and giving a rich texture to the images. And there's constant movement, until the film's denouement where character, story, camera and concept fuse together in common paralysis, where all seems frozen in reflection.