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To kill with hope is doubly painful, it is observed, thus Aesop's coin in Dakar. "Broke, two wives, seven kids and a hopeless showoff," the middle-aged potbelly (Makhouredia Gueye) ambles down the street in robes which flap like a collapsing tent. Overseas the young nephew sweeps gutters with the Eiffel Tower in the distance, the fruit of his labor is an order for 25,000 francs at the post office back home. Water and rice are purchased on credit even before uncle learns of the letter, friends and relatives and imams and swindlers descend swiftly. Collecting the cash requires identity cards, identity cards require birth certificates, birth certificates require bribes, quite a predicament for the fellow who's not exactly sure when he was born. "The world is going nuts!" Ousmane Sembène's outraged anecdote on red tape and scrounging, as spacious as Ladri di Biciclette and as brackish as Brewster's Millions. (The director turns up as one of the protagonist's creditors, seizing him by the scruff of the neck.) With its connotations of colonial bondage, the money order is practically a virulent intruder in the quotidian fabric, though the critique is double-edged—the piety and pride of old patriarchal ways are as stunting to the newly independent nation as the grasping bureaucracy replacing them. "Inshallah" is the byword, little it does for the sister who demands her share or the photographer who offers a toast after cheating a client. "In this country, only the crooks live well." Amid the despair, Sembène has time for a gag or two: Gueye sits on his prayer mat with his wives, and a brassiere salesman plunks his wares in front of the camera to block the image. "To become a wolf among wolves" is the dilemma, engagement and change are recommended antidotes (cf. Ray's Pratidwandi). With Ynousse N'Diaye, Isseu Niang, Mustapha Ture, Mouss Diouf, and Thérèse Bas.
--- Fernando F. Croce |