Emotions were running high, and the minute of silence too short at the Fespaco’s homage to Djibril Diop Mambéty and David Achkar, two filmmakers who passed away in 1998, and who truly gave themselves to the cinema. The Burkina movie theatre was jam-packed for the screening of David Achkar, une étoile filante by Mama Keïta and Dix mille ans de cinéma by Balufu Bakupa-Kayinda, two films which sensitively allow the two filmmakers to express themselves at length, and, above all, for the screening of La petite vendeuse de soleil, Mambéty’s last film.
« It is the little people who count, for they are the only consistent ones, the only naïve ones, which is why courage is theirs. They are the people who will never have a bank account, for whom every morning forms the same question mark, they are the honest people… It is a way of paying homage to the bravery of the street children… It is my love of children that makes me defy the elderly, the corrupted, and the haves, who do not, for that, necessarily have a soul. » Djibril Diop Mambéty.
The woman stopped by the police at the beginning of La petite vendeuse de soleil cries out from behind the bars: « I am a princess, and they call me a thief! » It is dawn. The image becomes fixed after the credits, playing on the diagonals of a building, a street, a shanty town, whilst a man sings a cappella. Even before Sili, the young handicapped girl, enters the frame with her crutches, the tone has been given: this film will give the excluded a voice, and that voice is oblique, the very opposite of the dominant schema. The little people are the man breaking stones, whose face and hands are captured by the camera whilst a bulldozer passes in front of the house under construction, or the young man who hoists Sili up on his back to sit her in his cart to take her to Dakar. The high angle shot down at the two youths and the horse’s head completes a 35 year cycle of African film, paying reverence to Ousmane Sembene’s Borom Sarret. The little people are also the grandmother singing a cappella who is shown repeatedly in a cycle by the montage when Sili arrives at the market. There is no one like Mambéty for capturing a face, or for using the setting to convey an idea: the meanders of the road, the rows of fridges, the horizontals of the road traffic…
Sili begs. The newspaper boys give a crippled youth in a wheel chair a rough time. But Sili, crutches in hand, is not daunted: « a girl can do whatever the boys can do! » In a wonderfully determined shot, she sets her pile of newspapers – the Soleil, a Dakar daily – on her head and draws a sun in guise of a signature on the register… This extreme verging on the sentimental and the magnificent is maintained throughout the film: Mambéty incessantly risks what, in other hands, could become stuffy or pretentious. And, through a play on visual and musical metaphors, through that other music that is the montage and the movement of the images, through the ambivalences of the narrative which marks a style of rupture and parody, he avoids grandiloquence, playing on the hyperbole: he dares the impossible, the chance that destiny offers when you know how to seize it. A man buys up all Sili’s newspapers, who can then go and party with her friends! This Christmas tale avoids being artificial, as Mambéty knows how to seize emptiness in order to fill it with a reality that oscillates between laughter and the tragic: it is the details of life that make the difference, the dead kitten at the roadside, the vast panoramic past the bus station, Sili’s walk accompanied by the sounds of the streets of Dakar, the Air Afrique slogan on a bridge advertising the Africa-Europe connection… By blending heterogeneous elements in this way, he simulates disorder to uncover the order that Sili imposes: the energy of her tenaciousness. She brushes off the policeman who is amazed to see her with so much money and who takes her down to the station. The princess from the opening shots sings behind her bars before a ‘no stopping’ sign… « There is hope for this country! »: their resolution will reinvest women with their freedom. For, in this profusion of images, this overflowing of senses, an unstoppable freedom springs forth.
Parlons grand-mère: Mambéty never stopped repeating, as he did in his short film on the shooting of Yaaba: « Grandmother will avenge the child we have brought to its knees ». In a final homage, an ultimate metaphor, Sili buys a parasol to protect herself from the sun – a respect of her song, like of her age, a respect of her Word that the world must hear, for she will « avenge » Africa…
The children can dance, Sili has already inverted the relation: she stops begging and begins giving; she chooses chance by keeping 13 Soleils, rather than the 25 offered to her…
« Why does I sell better than the Soleil? » The paper of the people, or the paper of the authorities: Sili has her own conception of politics: « I will carry on selling the Soleil, that way the government will be closer to the people! » But what good is politics before a tortured psyche? The princess has gone mad. Like in Le Franc, the film tends towards the sea, the life source, the movement of the origins. Wasis Diop’s jazz accompanies the ships in the port, but when it comes to looking at the world through the telescope, the ship horns and the jazz announce trouble. For, the boys have caught Sili and throw one of her crutches into the sea. She tells the tale of Leuk the hare to her saviour. The clarity of the fable. And the sellers of Sud echo their title page: « Africa has left the franc [frank]zone« . A final parody, a final joke. Mambéty, just like Sony Labou Tansi, seems to be saying: « Take me or leave me, but do not try to cultivate me« . It is in the sea that the frank man can find derision, dreams, serenity. The children step aside when her friend hoists the crutchless Sili up onto his shoulders. This is Mambéty’s legacy, a simple idea: victory is determination. He is able to conclude with a promise: « The breath of history has just been thrown into the sea: the first to breathe it will go to heaven ».
Many thanks for this final masterpiece.
///Article N° : 5375