Moolaade
We don't expect to see fables when we go to the movies. Films honor details of time and place, of dress and custom, of this character doing that thing. And certainly "Moolaad," the plainspoken Shakespearean masterpiece from the 81-year-old Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, is rooted in the specifics of Djerissa, the rural village in Burkina Faso where it was filmed. It also deals with a subject -- the ritual genital mutilation of African women -- that has received its share of recent headlines.
But "Moolaad" is told with an assurance and an urgency that raise it far above current-events agitprop. At its warmly beating heart, the film is concerned with the timeless struggle between men and women, or, more precisely, between those people in any society who seek to control and those who are moved to nurture.
Chief among the nurturers is Colle Ardo (Fatoumata Coulibaly), this film's Mother Courage. She's no one very important in the scheme of things -- just the second wife of one of the village's leading citizens -- but when "Moolaad" opens, four little girls have fled a "purification" ceremony to take refuge in her household. They know that Colle opposes the practice, since her own mutilation later resulted in the death of two children during childbirth; her one grown daughter, Amasatou (Salimata Traore), is one of the few village women who hasn't been "purified." Colle ties a rope across her threshold and pronounces a "moolaad," the tribal equivalent of sanctuary. No one can touch the girls until she utters the word to revoke it. The effort to get her to say that word will bring the village down around her ears.
Language carries unparalleled power in "Moolaad." The word "purification" itself conspires with the scarlet robes and snake-head staffs of the Salindana priestesses led by the Doyenne des Exciseuses (Mah Compaore) to disguise what the ritual actually is: the excision, without anesthetic or sterilization, of a girl's clitoris so that she is unable to derive pleasure from sex. Sembene never lays it out that bluntly, nor does he provide shock visuals. He doesn't have to. Genital mutilation is still practiced in 38 African countries. The audience "Moolaad" is intended for knows full well what "purification" means.
Colle's stubbornness slowly drives everyone in the village nuts. The local headman, the Doucoutigou, at first assumes the matter is just "a minor domestic dispute," but soon enough all are forced to take sides. Colle's husband, Cire, is secretly sympathetic but can't afford to lose face in front of his friends; his hard-liner elder brother, Amanthe, urges him to beat Colle until she says the word that will end the moolaad. The priestesses are an implacable and constant presence; Cire's other two wives, a practical-minded older woman and a fiery young vixen, wish Colle would mind her own business; the girls' mothers want their daughters back. Yet Colle holds firm.
It's Sembene's unshowy genius to let the conflict widen until no one can ignore what's at stake: the subjugation of one half of a society by the other. Nor is this merely a backwater battle. Modernity itself is on trial in "Moolaad" -- the headman's son, Ibrahima (Moussa Theophile Sowie), a Paris businessman who has returned wearing silk suits and bearing TVs, has to decide whether he will marry an unpurified "balokoro" like Amasatou against his father's wishes. The men literally pull the plug on the women's rebellion by confiscating the radios by which they get outside news and outside ideas, and the growing pile of boomboxes in the village square serves as a taunting, dark twin to the town mosque, as well as a conscious reminder of Nazi book burnings and other power plays. Sembene, a onetime labor organizer, freedom fighter, and novelist, knows his history, in large part because he has lived it.
At the same time, it's worth stressing how deeply pleasurable "Moolaad" is to watch. The director has reached that point in his career where craft disappears behind grace: The film's pace is unhurried, the colors bright, the musical lilt of balafon and kora on the soundtrack a treat to the ear. Life in Djerissa is held together by tradition, certainly, but also by a gentle, forgiving sense of humor that makes Colle's stand all the harder to fathom, even to her. Is saving a few girls worth destroying a village? Sembene doesn't pretend to have an answer -- his final image is itself an unsettling admission of uncertainty -- but he knows there can be no turning back.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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