33 Movies to Restore Your Faith in Humanity by Roger Ebert

Author:Roger Ebert [Ebert, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781449422257
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing LLC
Published: 2012-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

Moolaadé

NO MPAA RATING, 124 m., 2007

Fatoumata Coulibaly (Collé Gallo Ardo Sy), Maimouna Hélène Diarra (Hadjatou), Salimata Traoré (Amasatou). Directed by Ousmane Sembene and produced by Sembene and Thierry Lenouvel. Screenplay by Sembene.

Moolaadé is the kind of film that can be made only by a director whose heart is in harmony with his mind. It is a film of politics and anger, and also a film of beauty, humor, and a deep affection for human nature. Usually films about controversial issues are tilted too far toward rage or tear-jerking. Ousmane Sembene, who made this film when he was eighty-one, must have lived enough, suffered enough, and laughed enough to find the wisdom of age. I remember him sitting in the little lobby of the Hotel Splendid in Cannes, puffing contentedly on a Sherlock Holmes pipe that was rather a contrast with his bright, flowing Senegalese garb.

His film is about, and against, the custom of female circumcision, practiced in many Muslim lands (although Islamic law forbids it). Does that make you think you don’t want to see it? Think again. Sembene embodies his subject so deeply with his characters, and especially with his heroine, Collé, that it becomes a story about will, defiance, and ancient custom.

It is never actually too specific about what would be done to the four girls who flee to Collé for moolaadé, or protection. Sembene trusts us to know. He doesn’t exploit blood-drenched horror scenes, and his approach is actually more effective because he limits himself to off-screen cries, or a brief glimpse of the knife used by the village’s doyenne des exciseuses, the woman in charge of circumcisions. The knife is very small, wickedly hooked, hardly seen, and more frightening than a broadsword. Yet we learn that women support the removal of the clitoris because no man will marry a bride who has not been “cut.” The actress Fatoumata Coulibaly, who plays Collé, has said that she herself was circumcised; the result, as with most victims, was an absence of sexual pleasure, and often pain during sex.

Why would a man insist on this mutilation? Perhaps out of deep insecurity and a distrust, even fear, of women. But Moolaadé makes no such sweeping charges, and observes how the women themselves enforce and carry out the practice—because, of course, they want their daughters to find husbands. Collé has refused to let her own daughter be cut, but now the girl is engaged to a man returning home from France. Will Europe have freed him of ancient barbarities, or will he demand a bride who has been cut? Since the village hopes for wealth from the returning man, there is social pressure on Collé. And just at that moment, the girls on the brink of adolescence run weeping to Collé and beg for shelter in the compound she shares with her husband and his other wives.

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