Touki Bouki is a wild and clever comedy, but you’d never guess that at first.
This 1973 feature from Senegalese writer-director Djibril Diop Mambety opens on a pastoral scene of a young boy driving a herd of cattle, the lilting notes of a flute on the soundtrack. Quickly, though, the movie drops us at the beasts’ destination: an abattoir with blood-soaked floors, where we watch one animal’s throat cut amidst a clatter of tools, men’s voices, and creaturely groans.
It’s only after this grisly scene that we’re properly introduced to the movie’s main characters: Anta (Mareme Niang), a young woman and university student who catches criticism for wearing men’s pants, and Mory (Magaye Niang), her prankish, roustabout lover. The cattle skull that Mory has attached to the front of his motorcycle connects this pair to the abattoir and hints at their fate. In post-colonial Senegal—caught between the urban and the rural, the traditional and the modern, the African and the European—can this countercultural couple avoid getting butchered?
As Anta and Mory try to scam and scrounge enough money to pay for a trip to Paris—cheating a card sharp in one scene, stealing the proceeds of a wrestling match in another—Touki Bouki (Wolof for The Journey of the Hyena) plays like a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon. (Like the anarchic young women in Vera Chytilova’s Daisies, Anta and Mory have a bit of Bugs Bunny in them.) Outside of the abattoir, Mambety fills every frame with either beauty (the sun filtering through colored, plastic water buckets; the sea washing over rocks while Anta and Mory make love) or sharp wit. Josephine Baker’s lightly elegant “Paris, Paris, Paris” is a recurring, ironic musical theme, often playing as Mory’s horned motorcycle passes through distinctly African landscapes. An extended comic set piece involves a cab driver who brings Anta to an abandoned seaside home she claims to own; increasingly uncomfortable, he eventually flees in terror because it’s a place where “only white people” would live.
The film’s bravura sequence—in which Mambety’s humor, avant-garde editing, and social critique all come together—takes place after Anta and Mory have stolen clothes from a wealthy acquaintance and convinced the man’s driver to take them to the capital of Dakar. What follows are a series of images seemingly disconnected in time and place: Mory, standing naked in the back of the convertible making grand pronouncements; children running alongside rural roads; and crowds gathered for a pompous parade on an urban street. Eventually these images merge in a picture of Anta and Mory—fancily dressed and sitting together in the back of the convertible—as part of the parade proper, waving to adoring crowds. Is this their imagination? The culmination of their con? Something else?
The ending, equally, could be taking place in both a real and imagined world. Having made it to a passenger ship bound for France, Anta and Mory are about to board until he pauses, looking stricken, and Mambety slips in a handful of nearly subliminal shots of a steer awaiting execution in the abattoir. It’s a shocking way to bring Touki Bouki full circle, reminding us that there are crucial sociopolitical implications to its magical-realist playfulness.
(1/19/2023)
