How do I do justice to a movie that vexed even Roger Ebert?
Sometimes I seek the right words, and I despair. What can I write that will inspire you to see "Moolaade?" This was for me the best film at Cannes 2004, a story vibrating with urgency and life. It makes a powerful statement and at the same time contains humor, charm and astonishing visual beauty.
But even my words of praise may be the wrong ones, sending the message that this is an important film, and therefore hard work. Moviegoers who will cheerfully line up for trash are cautious, even wary, about attending a film they fear might be great. And if I told you the subject of the film is female circumcision -- would I lose you? And if I placed the story in an African village, have you already decided to see "National Treasure" instead?
All I can tell you is, "Moolaade" is a film that will stay in my memory and inform my ideas long after other films have vaporized.
I could begin and end with that -- a simple "what Roger Ebert said." But I'll try. As Ebert predicted it would do for him, Moolaade has stayed in my memory. It was released in 2004 and gradually made its way around the small artsy-indie movie houses (which is how I first saw it), but it was not released on DVD until after the death of writer-director Ousmane Sembene in 2007.
There is no way to describe Moolaade that disguises that it has its difficult moments. How could a movie about female genital mutilation not? But -- and maybe this is part of what makes it capital-A Art, and certainly part of what makes it faithful to how life works -- it is not a picture of unrelieved grimness. It does not obscure how the pleasures of daily life coexist with strife and cruelty and tragedy.
The story is this: Six little girls run away from what the villagers call PURIFICATION (capitalized in the subtitles). Four of them run to Colle, who seven years before had refused to subject her own daughter to it, and Colle invokes moolaade, a sort of spell of protection.
Set against the rhythms of daily life -- mothering, carrying water from the village pump, buying stale bread and batteries from the traveling salesman called Mercenaire -- the story takes shape from that point. It's about rebellion, quiet and fierce, triumphant and tragic, desperate and victorious. (Sometimes all at once.) It's about how women negotiate and deploy what power they can in a society in which they sit on the ground while men are in chairs, and it makes clear that powerful women are not always feminist heroines, that sisterhood is anything but automatic. At the same time, the movie is about the birth of unexpected solidarity, beginning with the group of young girls who resist a fate they have been raised to believe is inevitable.
Moolaade is also about tradition and change in a society in which Islam is layered over an earlier heritage that simultaneously provides the requirement that girls be cut and Colle's ability to protect them. A mosque overlooks an earlier monument and in front of both, the men of the village pile radios they have confiscated from their wives and daughters, thinking the radios are the sources of rebellion, while their leader's son has come back from France in a suit and bearing televisions.
Specific acts of resistance provide the dramatic highlights, but they are given context by the underlying dynamics of village life. Colle is the face of resistance, entirely steadfast, but others are less sure where they stand. Colle is at times aided and at times dominated by her husband's first wife, whose allegiances are not always clear. Colle's daughter at first urges her mother to protect the runaways, then later has cause for regret when she realizes that not being cut will cost her socially. We don't all come to bravery in the first instance, and how we decide between courage and conformity is one of Moolaade's central themes.
Not always easy, no. But so worth it in beauty and warmth and humor and inspiration, and not nearly as grim as "a masterpiece about female genital mutilation" makes it sound. Or, as a friend described it, "the feel-good female genital mutilation movie of the year." And also: What Roger Ebert said.