Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

"Moolaadé" (2004), the last film made by the Senagalese "father of African cinema," Ousmane Sembene (Mandabi, Ceddo), who died last summer at the age of 84, is as anti-patriarchal a film as any i can recall. indeed, the closest rival would be his earlier "Xala" (1975). His 2000 "Faat Kiné" might also be in competition, but I haven't seen it.

"Moolaadé" dramatizes the refusal of one village woman in Burkina Faso, Collé Gallo Ardo Sy (Fatoumata Coulibaly) to perpetuate genital mutilation (a part of the female initiation cult staffed entirely by women). Though "purified" by a clitorodectomy herself, Collé Gallo had refused to allow her daughter Amasatou (Salimata Traoré) to be mutilated about a decade earlier. Knowing that, four of six young girls who escaped the initiation camp before having their clitorises excised come to Collé Gallo for protection.

Collé Gallo knows that she will be accused of fomenting revolt, though she had in no way encouraged the young rebels. She grants them her protection (the Moolaadé, which is marked by a multi-colored rope across the threshhold of the complex of huts of her husband (she is his second wife and has at least tacit support of the senior wife, Hadjatou (Maimouna Hélène Diarra).


Amasatou is uncomfortable with the stigma of "impurity" (having an intact clltoris), especially when her prospective father-in-law, local ruler Dugutigi (Joseph Traoré) breaks off the engagement of his son, Doucouré, who is returning from years in France and designates a ten-year-old bride.

An itinerant merchant, called "Mercenaire" (Dominique Zeida) who had been drummed out of UN peace-keeping forces for protesting soldier's pay being annexed by officers, labels such marriage as pedophilia and makes the returning son fell uneasy. "Mercenaire" also stops a husband from beating his wife, something viewed as even worse than a woman failing to be "purified."

Fatoumata Coulibaly and Maimouna Hélène Diarra pretty much carry the movie, a lot of which takes place in their husband's compound in his absence. Much of the rest takes place outdoors in the counsel of elders that advises Dugutigi.

Doucouré vacillates between respect for his father and wanting a bride of nineteen rather than one of ten or eleven. He is vexed at the ban on radios (regarded as making the women more difficult to control and seized from across the village), but is not a hero. He demonstrates little agency until after two heroes have stood up and received violent reactions.
.
Tragedy and drama build. Sembene explains nothing, shows rather than tells of the complicity of the women who have survived "purification" with inflicting it on new generations of girls. The primary function of clitorodecomies is to keep women from straying from their masters (husbands), but the butchery is part of "tradition," and a part in which women have not just the leading role, but the only roles. (i will resist the temptation to go off into a discourse on the centrality of mothers to perpetuating patriarchy or onto male genital mutilation as a similar "traditional" reduction of later sexual pleasure rationalized as hygiene.)

As horrifying as the subject is, the film is absorbing and not at all preachy. I don't think it needed to take quite as long as it does (124 minutes), but there are multiple plot lines and representations of social change both from below and from outside influences. Although Sembene hoped to influence Africans to look at this bogusly Islamic (and just plain bogus!) tradition, it seems that the movie has not played in sub-Saharan Africa.

The DVD includes a trailer and a documentary about Sembene (without any footage of him speaking) that provides an overview of how he went from being a French soldier in Germany to being a novelist to making thirteen films, including the first feature film shot by an African in Africa (Black Girl).


© 2008, Stephen O. Murray


Epinions practices its own form of clitorodectomy with its insidious word filter -- which in this case didn't even display which word was being blocked.






Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD