Souleymane Cisse, is one of the most famous African directors of all times
Baara is one of the early movies directed by Souleymane Cissé, the famous Malian director and producer. It features three different storylines that are only accidently or superficially inter-related until the later part of the movie.
The movie starts with close-ups of a sweating man, shot frontally, in profile and from the rear. And then reality kicks in. We are introduced to three very different characters. Firstly, a young man, named Balla Diarra (the “sweating man”), makes a living by carrying loads of luggage, vegetables or packages for various clients that he can find throughout the city. Not all of them pay him on the spot, so Balla works very hard to make a living. Then the focus of the movie abruptly shifts to another character, this time an engineer, Balla Traoré, working at a local factory, and his unhappy wife who spends the entire day doing nothing while her husband is almost always away. Then, again, the action is relocated to what appears to be the office of a wealthy African businessman, Makam Sissoko, who is experiencing some financial and personal problems. While the three characters evolve separately for a while, there’s a connection between them. Balla (the porter) helps the engineer by carrying a load of groceries for him to his house. Not having change to spare for the porter, the engineer asks for the young man’s name so that he can pay him the following day. They realize that the engineer’s last name Traoré, would make Balla Diarra his slave, since the Diarras have been subordinated to the Traorés for centuries. The two men laugh at the coincidence and a special bond between the two characters developes, despite the difference in the social and economic status. The following day, after Diarra is arrested for not having an ID on him the engineer bails him out and offers him a job at the factory. It is kind of a mystery how Traoré was able to find the porter in the prison, and why exactly he would care that much for him, but that’s a different story. By the time the porter is offered a job at the factory, we already know that the engineer is in the service of Makam Sissoko, also known as The Director, the third character introduced at the beginning of the movie.
A sideline story develops around the status of the wives of Balla Traoré and Makam Sissoko Djenaba. The Director’s fourth wife is young, beautiful, independent and in love with someone else than her husband. The engineer’s wife is a highly educated young woman (we learn that she studied in France before coming back to Africa) that dreams of becoming financially independent from her husband, who in turn refuses to allow her to get a job. She strangely reminded me of Maiguru, one of the secondary characters in Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga.
Until now, the movie has the prospect of being a very interesting and moving product of African cinema. Then things suddenly change when various conflicts move to a ridiculous and almost irrational crisis point. Balla Traoré is trying to improve the working conditions of the hundreds of employees at the factory where he is employed. The Director has agreed to allow him to make it a profitable business and Traoré shows clear signs that he will do exactly that. When he, Traoré, organizes a meeting to hear the workers’ complaints and suggestions, the Director is told by some of his close informants about the meeting. Despite the fact that he seems to have some recollection of this event, he orders his informants and allies to kill the engineer. When he returns to the city (he went to the countryside where he consulted a marabout, a traditional healer) he finds out that his wife was cheating on him. And he kills her as well. The movie closes in a circular way with fragments of the same dream and the figures of Balla Traoré and Balla Diarra.
Why watch the movie?
The movie introduces the viewers to unexplored aspects of African culture and the city life. There are some broad characteristics that make this movie worth watching: it deals with the social dynamics of an African city (most movies about Africa are focused on African villages); it introduces us to the lives of the African middle class; it features young Western-educated rising elite and brings in the discontents of the African proletariat. Moreover, the movie explores the crisis of masculinity, the conflict between generations and the modern African urban social class that is based on individualism and self sustainability.
The masculinity crisis that some of the men featured in the movie experience is explored at various points throughout the movie. The factory director, Makan Sissoko, distrusts his wife completely, despite the fact that he claims he really loves her. And he doesn’t see a problem with this contradiction. He tells Balla Traoré that one can never trust in women and, at least for the sake of his boss, Traoré nods in agreement. When the Director’s wife dares to defy him by speaking up to him, he remarks genuinely surprised: “she acts as if she were my equal.” Balla doesn’t allow his wife to find a job despite the fact that she is highly educated. Despite the fact that he is suspicious of his wife, she is the one in charge of the money: she has to sign for a check that is meant to cover part of the state taxes the Director owed for that year.
Sissoko and Traoré have very different views on business models and ways of treating their employees. The engineer’s untimely and, I think, unnecessary death comes from the theoretical and practical differences between the two characters.
Lastly, we notice from the beginning of the movie that Balla Traoré is an ambitious, modern and progressive young man who rejects tradition whenever he encounters it. In an early scene, he refutes his wife’s plea to help her family who is presumably living somewhere outside the city. When he argues that he cannot provide for two families at once, his wife replies with a question that still represents the expectations behind many fixed or mediated marriages in Africa: “How can you love me and not my family?” This feeds into the larger discourse regarding men’s attributions and what it is expected of them once they actually marry into the family instead of simply marrying one person.
Given the fact that this movie was made in the 1970s, it is an important and significant movie of its time. However, the director could have achieved a much better final product even if the limitations of the time were quite extensive. The first and most important critique is the fact that the way in which the scenes supersede one another is quite confusing. We are not being given enough information about the characters to easily navigate between the various stories presented in the movie. Spending time figuring out who’s who and what that represents, takes time from actually enjoying the film. Lastly, the sudden string of deaths for ridiculous reasons (the engineer organized a union-like meeting, while Djenaba speaks up to her husband and accuses of being corrupt) contradicts the clear vision and the realistic approach that was adopted by the director before the crisis unfolds. Lastly, calling the movie Baara (The Porter,) therefore might not have been the most inspired decision, as the porter is only one of the three main characters whose lives are presented in the film.
Nonetheless, the movie is certainly worth watching.
This movie is rated 7/10
