GRADE: 9
Mory, a cowherd, and Anta, a university student, try to make money in order to go to Paris and leave their boring past behind.
Director: Djibril Diop Mambéty
Country of Origin: Senegal
Thoughts:
There’s nothing like watching a movie from a region one doesn’t often see depicted on the screen. That certainty that you’re going to see and hear things you’ve probably never heard before is thrilling. Touki-Bouki had me excited from the very first visual of a young boy herding cattle across a plain. Gorgeous.
Unfortunately, that scene led to another in which one of the cattle is brutally slaughtered. I can watch horror and gangster movies and never bat an eye, but scenes of animals actually being slaughtered are too harsh. Clearly, it was a reality of 1970’s Senegalese life, and symbolically it was actually extremely effective. But, I could not keep my eyes open the three times it happened.
Luckily, the two leads, with their slender, taut bodies and proud, rebellious faces, were mesmerizing every second they were on the screen. As was the non-stop barrage of superb images and sequences.
The soundtrack–an Africanized melange of jazz and psychedelia–consistently caught my mind’s focus. So memorable.