Tag: 3-Star Movies

Weddings and funerals are perhaps the rituals that most bind cultures across space and time. This affords Dao—the sixth feature by French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis—an enrapturing universality born of detailed specificity, as it presents a funeral commemoration in West Africa alongside a wedding in France a year later. The film places unrelenting emphasis on the meaning behind traditions and their subsequent evolution when people move away and return. And yet, this sharp focus on migration is expressed through liberating artistry, which engenders an alluring familiarity that makes the three-hour runtime feel like a breeze.

Dao, named for the Taoist belief in an unceasing motion that flows through and unites all things, is a film of anthropological self-reflection, but it is also a surprising exploration of cinematic process. It begins with Gomis offering a documentary peek into his casting—or at least, a peek he frames in documentary form—before dramatizing the more intimate parts of his life. The script was inspired by a funeral ceremony for Gomis’ father in the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. The writer-director welcomes us into this personal tale through the lens of his professional identity to highlight how the filmic and the cultural, and the individual and the social, inextricably overlap.

It’s here, in this pseudo-documentary introduction, that we meet several of the movie’s actors as they first audition and screen test together. These include the nonprofessional Katy Corréa, the film’s eventual lead, who seems reluctant to participate but whose input Gomis actively seeks. In fact, he asks most of his actresses—many of them first- or second-generation Africans in France—what types of roles they fantasize about playing. Some suggest doctors. Others conjure complicated, villainous vixens. The implicit suggestion is that this exercise is about the kinds of complex parts, or even real-world professions, they are often denied.

Before long, Gomis introduces his bifurcated plot, in which Corréa’s character, the middle-aged immigrant Gloria, returns to her small Guinean village a year after her father’s funeral for a commemoration ceremony. It is also the first time in many years that her French-born daughter Nour (D’Johé Kouadio, also glimpsed in the movie’s opening) has visited the dusty rural locale, making it a long-overdue opportunity to connect with her roots. However, she no longer speaks any of the local languages, such as Wolof and Manjak, if she ever learned them in the first place, leaving her mother to act as interpreter and cultural guide as she meets various aunts, uncles and distant relations.

The two women are greeted with a mix of beaming pride and subtle disdain by the poverty-stricken village, highlighting the ever-complicated dynamics of postcolonial emigration and its unavoidable class dimensions. It is here, while introducing Nour to her relatives—who inevitably comment on how much she has grown—that Gloria also mentions her daughter’s pending nuptials the following year. This quickly propels us forward in time to the wedding and its lush countryside retreat, as the plot reveals itself to be largely a cinéma vérité depiction of each series of events as they might naturally unfold.

Cutting unobtrusively back and forth between the wedding and the days-long memorial, Gomis implicitly binds together the two halves of Nour and Gloria’s lived experiences through extended scenes of family gatherings and song and dance. He films these parallel narratives with the same warmth he brought to his musically tinged Congolese family drama Félicité, which in 2017 won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale. Although Dao left this year’s festival empty-handed—a major surprise—it remains a significant contribution to contemporary African cinema.

There is no dearth of conversations in the village about the lingering effects of colonial rule, and no shortage of awkward interactions either, such as an estranged cousin arriving at Nour’s reception with a surprise pregnant girlfriend. This leads to numerous stilted exchanges and eventually a hilarious scuffle. Gomis orchestrates it all with such free-flowing verve that it feels neither academic nor overly chaotic, but entirely naturalistic, as though he had simply dropped in on a real family and begun filming.

Gomis builds each extended scene with immense care, both for the moments themselves and for the way they adhere to the larger back-and-forth structure. The result is often euphoric. The aforementioned fisticuffs, despite their sloppiness, become the subject of some of the most rousing filmmaking you are likely to see all year, set against a jazzy soundtrack whose rhythms mirror the movie’s improvised nature. Back in the motherland, the instrumentation takes on more culturally specific tones, but the fundamentals always cross-pollinate: rhythm and percussion, joy and uncertainty.

However, the biggest difference between the movie’s two halves is perhaps the level of rootedness in each ritual. The village commemorations are centuries old, and Nour learns their meaning for the first time as each tradition unfolds. In contrast, her wedding is a patchwork of cultures, both French and West African, with popular English-language tunes and even made-up a cappella songs included for good measure. As much as Dao is a film about death, it is also, as its title suggests, a film of cultural rebirth and of finding oneself in moments of uncertainty—not just individually, but collectively—and of conjuring tangible things and ethereal ideas to pass down.

And yet, despite the movie highlighting the distinction between native and diaspora cultures, the very roots of tradition loop back around by its end in lucid fashion. Gomis never equivocates and avoids didacticism through a robust presentation of the village’s folkloric beliefs, which, when it comes to memorializing the dead, center on finding certainty through spiritual communion to better understand how the deceased died and what they leave behind. Regardless of where Gomis places his camera—in the place he is from or where he is headed—he finds people at their most vulnerable, reconnecting with old friends and lovers and preserving or creating rituals to confront the uncertainty of existence itself.

Through all this, Gomis’s filmmaking embodies the very concept of Dao—perpetual spiritual motion that binds people together despite historical tumult. The result is a work of documentary simplicity imbued with a sense of occasion. When it begins, you may only have a faint sense of who is who. But three hours later, it’s as though you have spent a lifetime with these families that now feel like your own.

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