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

(Obviously, the wrong image is here: there are no blondes in "Xala" and no speaking parts for the one white character who remains from the colonial era, but the product details for what shows up from searching "Xala" here are right.)

"Xala" is a Wolof category for a curse of impotence made by some expert. We might call it "witchcraft," except that it may be openly made. Also, the curse may be counteracted by mahouts, who are more holy men than "witches." At least in Ousmane Sembene's 1975 movie, none of the practitioners to whom one of the Senegal regime's kleptocrats goes for help is female. Also none go into a trance to cure him.

The movie begins with the transfer of power from the French colonial officials to Africans. "Socialism, African style" turns out to be Africans speaking French, washing their Mercedeses in Evian, and robbing the country. The main case in point is Hadji Aboucader Beye (Thierno Leye) who has sold a hundred tons of rice that was supposed to be for the people in order to take a third wife.

After a very long portrayal of the wedding and preparations to deflower the bride, El Hadji cannot get it up. He goes to a series of mahouts. To the one who lifts the curse, he writes a check that bounces. His expropriation of the rice to add a wife whom he cannot penetrate leads to his fall from the cabal of kleptocrats. The mahout who lifted the curse reimposes it and to remove it a second time requires abject humiliation.

Showing the feckless "servants of the people" enriching themselves has been all too true of post-colonial African autocracies. Sembene's movies were routinely banned in Senegal and other African countries.

I wish that I could like this worthy movie more. The absurdities of the new elite are not particularly funny and most scenes go on much too long for my sensibilities. The 122-minute movie could easily have been around 90.

There are no DVD bonus features and the transfer (or original image) is none too sharp.  Some of the interior scenes seem underlit. Occasionally, there are white subtitles on white backgrounds, though only a few. Some lines are not translated at all, but I don't think much, if anything, is lost in either.

"Xala" is important in the meager history of African critiques of post-colonial elites and as an attempt to speak truth to power. I think that "Mooladé" is a better movie (aimed at female genital mutilation euphemized as "circumcision") and "Ceddo" I remember (from 15 years ago when Sembene attended the San Francisco International Film Festival) as being a trenchant attack on the incursion of Islam into West Africa.

I have also written about Sembene's first feature film (indeed, the first feature film by a sub-Saharan African film-maker), "Black Girl" (El Hadji's first wife has a poster of it in her house), which I'd say is a critique of racism and to some extent, like "Xala" a critique of worshipping Europe and "Mabdabi," which shows tragicomic encounters between tradition and new bureaucratized money economy. Like "Xala," those two movies  drag IMHO, and have nonactors delivering some awkwardly dialogueawkwardly. I'm quite ready to grant that  it may be that their pace is West African and Sembene's understanding of how to make his points for an audience that has seen fewer movies than I have. While not fast-moving, "Mooladé" did not seem to drag as much to me.


©  2008, Stephen O. Murray

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age