Les Saignantes directed by Jean-Pierre Bekolo

In 1998, Nigeria’s brutal dictator General Sani Abacha died in bed with two prostitutes. The exact details of his death are not common knowledge, but the rumours abound. Some say his death “by heart attack” was Viagra induced; others spin tales of the prostitutes assassinating him with a poisoned apple. The myths that surround this historical incident point to the importance of the event in the national imagination, and have inspired oblique references in quite a few creative works.[1] In “The Last Sleep” a short story by Sunday Ayewanu, several mammy water spirits disguised as foreign prostitutes overcome the evil ruler of “Benueria.” In a sexual/spiritual struggle, they insist on him giving them government contracts and leave him dead with exhaustion.

The sleaze surrounding the corrupt government of the Abacha regime and the almost spiritual nature of his fortuitous death, as imagined in Ayewanu, is what I thought of when I saw Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s striking and disturbing film Les Saignantes, the winner of the 2007 Silver Stallion at FESPACO film festival. Set in the year 2025, the film opens provocatively with an almost naked young woman floating over a stout elderly man.[2] Strapped into a harness, she performs acrobatic sexual maneuvers— pointing her fingers in an imitation of shooting while thrusting her pelvis into his. Although the harness might seem to indicate the servile nature of the woman, here Majolie is in complete control. The old man lies back passively, waiting for her to swoop down upon him. The next thing we know the old man is dead. Whether this is an accident—he died of heart failure and old age—or whether this is a spiritual assassination performed in her shooting position, we are never quite sure, but it soon becomes apparent that Majolie has on her hands the death of a high ranking government official, the SGCC, who had been going to give her a government contract before he died in flagrante. The rest of the film traces the bizarre adventures she and her friend Chouchou go through to first dispose of the body, reconstruct it, and then hold an elaborate W.I.P (Wake of Important Person) to advance their own careers



A futuristic film set in a dystopian Cameroonian city vaguely reminiscent of the dystopian Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s classic BladeRunner, Les Saignantes is shot in high contrast lighting in what seems to be one long continuous night. The throbbing bass soundtrack of the film underscores the pulse of its rapid, jump-cut, music-video style editing. The characterization of the future city is a pessimistic allegory of the contemporary nation in Africa. By the year 2025, nothing has progressed; rather the country is still ruled by abusive power-drunk leaders who promise contracts to their mistresses; the police still take bribes and have no authority to actually investigate the crimes of the rich and powerful. Near the end of the film the smooth woman’s voiceover, which has performed the narrator’s function throughout the film, intones “We were already dead.” Re-watching the film with these words in mind, one wonders if the film, set a few years ahead in the future in 2025, is not the portrait of the spiritual aftermath of nation that has already died.

The entire culture seems to revolve around rituals of death. The W.I.P.’s become the ceremonies where political connections are made. At an elegant cocktail party or at home with Chouchou’s mother, the sophisticated revelers munch distractedly on maggots and drink what looks like radio-active embalming liquid from giant martini glasses. The mysterious women with their uniform of red headscarves, who cluster around Chouchou’s mother, flicker in and out like ghosts. The narrator makes it ambiguous whether any of the women in the film are spirits or ghosts, dead or alive. With the mysterious force mevoungou, referenced throughout the film, there seems to be little differentiation between the two.

Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye argues in Tradition and Modernity that “[t]he conception of modernity may give the impression that modernity represents a break with tradition and is thus irreconcilable with it; such an impression would clearly be false. For one thing, every society in the modern world has many traditional elements inherited and accepted from previous, that is ‘premodern’, generations…” (Gyekye 271). While Gyekye’s conception of modernity is optimistic, Bekolo seems to invoke death to illustrate the end results of a corrupted modernity. He visualizes the “mammy water” universe of “tradition,” in which the spiritual is inextricably tangled up in the tangible. Mevoungou the mystical power that controls the bodies of the young women after the death of the SGCC is a kind of lifeblood that lies at the heart of the society and which seems to provide the only hope for a “resurrection.”[3]

Given, Bekolo’s fascination with the process of filmmaking itself, I couldn’t help wondering if his portrayal of witchcraft and mevoungou does not have something to do with the medium of film.[4] The film opens, like so many other African films, with a voiceover reminiscent of an oral storyteller and is then interspersed with chapter captions: metaquestions about the possibility of filmmaking in postcolonial Cameroon: 1) How do you make an anticipation (futuristic/science fiction) film in a country with no future? 2) How can you make a film in a country where acting is subversive? 3) How can you make a horror film in a place where death is the party? 4) How can you film a love story, in a place where love is impossible? 5) How can you make a crime film where investigation is forbidden? 6) How can you watch a film like this and do nothing afterwards? After the opening chapter heading, almost half of the film passes before the second chapter comes, but the rest follow in a rapid succession, pounding home the point. If none of these tidy European genres (Science fiction, Horror, Romance, Crime/Investigation) can capture the paradoxes of postcolonial Cameroon, Bekolo indicates that he will create an uneasy amalgam of them all. His refusal to follow the “rules” of filmmaking, which has alarmed so many Western critics, indicates the subversive potential available to those who wield the camera.[5]

Les Saignantes references the grotesque humour of Quentin Tarantino and Hollywood horror films in the cliché of the chain-saw wielding cannibal, as well as the excesses of postmodern Hollywood cross-genre films (one of the pin-up posters in Chouchou’s bedroom is of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge), but he also draws on African orality and urban-legend so often captured in Nollywood videos: government officials who use witchcraft to reinforce their corrupt power. Mevoungou used as a counter-witchcraft against the patriarchal order in Les Saignantes, works similarly to the sorceress’s sex-changing challenge to the patriarchy in Bekolo’s first film Quartier Mozart. Filmmaking, Bekolo implies, like mevoungou allows one to 1) expose the decay at the heart of power in the postcolonial nation and 2) to imaginatively overcome the powerful and corrupt leaders of the nation, using the subaltern figure of the young woman. As the girls prepare for the W.I.P., one of them expresses her fear that their plan will fail: “what if it doesn’t work? We’re just two holes that get screwed in the end.” However, if the postcolonial nation is often represented as a woman raped by the military, if in a crime-ridden urban environment, young women find that they are most often exploited for their sexuality, Majolie and Chouchou turn this symbol of the exploitation of women, their sexuality, into a weapon with which to destroy the powerful minister of state. Mevoungou becomes a potent source of agency and of imagination. As the camera lingers on dark city streets, the final few sentences of the woman’s voiceover clinch the parallel between the witchcraft and filmmaking: “It was mevoungou dancing, dreaming. Mevoungou danced, dreamed in technicolour. We were living in 2025, children behaving as if we had no parents, no children. We had to move on. The country could not continue like that. We had to change”

Read through the metaquestions that structure the nonlinear narrative, Bekolo’s film can be interpreted as a call to action. As the gigantic moon sinks behind trees, the final chapter caption emerges: “How can you watch a film like this and do nothing afterwards?” The tangled plot recedes leaving his questions in relief. This is not merely a pessimistic vision of the future but an indication of imaginative possibilities opened up through the medium of film.

NOTES

For a trailer of the film see this you tube clip:

[1]Nigerian novelists Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Purple Hibiscus and Helon Habila in Waiting for an Angel both subtly reimagine what Christopher Okonkwo calls the “woman-implicated death” of Sani Abacha. Okonkwo notes that Beatrice’s poisoning of the abusive and authoritarian Eugene in Purple Hibiscus re-enacts Abacha’s death. I argue in my MA thesis on Waiting for an Angel that the mob of women who break down the billboard with a smug condom-wielding man foreshadows Abacha’s death that occurs on the margins of the narrative.
[2] The costume that Majolie wears in this scene is visually reminiscent of the famous metal bikini Princess Leia wears in George Lucas’s classic science fiction film Return of the Jedi. The intertextual link here is significant in that Princess Leia is also involved in a struggle against corrupt male-dominated government structures.
[3] Chouchou’s mother and the women in her house who appear and reappear on beat visually echo the witches in Bekolo’s earlier film Quartier Mozart. In Quartier Mozart the neighborhood witch and a young girl named Queen of the Hood change sexes to infiltrate the world of men and expose hidden corruptions at the heart of the patriarchy/nation, represented by the policeman MadDog.
[4] My word choice here is intentional. The definition of the medium as a person through which a spirit is channeled and the medium as the material out of which art is created seem to be conflated in Les Saignantes.
[5] In a quick survey of film reviews on blogs, most of the ones I found were overwhelmingly negative--much of the criticism centred around Bekolo’s assumed inability to follow the rules of filmmaking: http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/003429.html, http://www.fardelsbear.com/fn3/archives/cat_les_saignantes.html, http://www.blogto.com/toronto_film_festival_2005/2005/09/les_saignantes_at_tiff/

Works Cited:

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2003

Ayawanu, Sunday. “The Last Sleep.” Cramped Rooms and Open Spaces: An Anthology of New Short Fiction from the Association of Nigerian Authors. Ed. Ibrahim Sheme. Lagos: Nayee Press, 1999. 16-28.

Bekolo, Jeanne-Pierre, dir. Les Saignantes. Quartier Mozart Films, 2005.

_____________________. Quartier Mozart. 1992.

Gyekye, Kwame. Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Habila, Helon. Waiting for an Angel. New York: Norton, 2003.

Lucas, George, dir. Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi. 1983.

Lurmann, Baz, dir. Moulin Rouge. 2001.

Okonkwo, Christopher N. “Talking and Te(x)stifying: Ndibe, Habila, and Adichie’s ‘Dialogic’ Narrativizations of Nigeria’s Post-War Nadir: 1984-1998” presented at ASA Conference 2005, Washington D.C. 17 November 2005.

Scott, Ridley, dir. Bladerunner. 1982.

Photo Credits: All from Bekolo Films.