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

"Mandabi" (aka "The Money Order") is a 1968 film in color from Senegal that was written and directed by Ousmane Sembene, who remains the only African director to have achieved an international reputation. It is also the first film Sembene shot in Wolof (the dominant language in Senegal; it was a French colony when he was growing up).

A remittance money order from a nephew in Paris turns out to be a curse rather than a blessing for the corpulent, petulant, and startlingly vain sexagenarian Ibrahim (Makhouredia Gueye) who has two younger wives ((Yunus Ndlay and Isseau Niang) who get along with each other well and are raising seven children. A layabout who has never had any significant money before is unknown to the bank, and the cashier will not cash the money order without an ID card. To get an ID card, Ibrahim needs a birth certificate, three photos, and a fee, none of which he has. To get a birth certificate, he needs to know his birth date.

Pretty much every step of the way he is robbed by those with some street smarts who recognize him for a rube and inveigled by those in need (which may include a professional beggar woman) who sense his joy in appearing to be magnanimous.

At the start, Ibrahim is insufferably smug, waited on hand and foot by the two wives. Those who fleece him are mostly dressed in European clothes rather than flowing robes like his own. He is so lost in the modern(izing) post-colonial Africa of the 1960s and so afflicted with scammers, that I started to feel sorry for him--along with sympathizing with his wives who attempt to keep his penchant for appearing a Big Man (in addition to being a big man) from bankrupting them.

The music sounds more South Asian than West African and the travails of a self-important man "of the people" remind me more of R. K. Narayan novels than African ones. (The sun beats down in both places!).

The pacing is slow, the camera is usually in the middle distance from the characters, and the ending is unsatisfying (not to mention unsubtle). The subsidiary characters are well developed and the milieu of a society in which money is everything (but few have it--and those who do are grasping for more) is clearly shown through the characters and the differing kinds of manipulation (traditional and monetarized).

The New Yorker DVD contains no bonus features and obviously was not remastered. The colors are not fresh, but aren't very faded--though there are some scenes in which facial features are not visible (faded to black?)

Ibrahim calls for solidarity among the poor, and one moral of the story seems to be that aid from afar (requiring monetary relations) creates more problems than it solves. Whether an analogy from micro (indeed, kin-based) relations to aid from foreign governments was on Sembene's mind, I don't know, though the few films of his that I've seen show real losses and imaginary gains from Arabic as well as (later) from French influences, so it seems possible that Sembene looks askance at foreign aid (governments' or faith-based charities').

Also see my review of Sembene's first and last feature films,  Black Girl and Mooladé.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD