Touki Bouki

1973 African romance story

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A couple in Senegal decide to escape Senegal and travel to France by any means necessary, including crime.

Don't be fooled by the cute title because within ten minutes, there are two graphic scenes involving the slaughtering of animals. A cow is slaughtered in a slaughterhouse, most of the screen filled with red, and later, the audience is treated to a scene where a goat is killed. I would much rather watch a human die than an animal any day, so these weren't exactly easy scenes. But they set the stage, giving an abstract exposition that helps make the characters' decision to flee make sense.

The film starts dialogue free, and like all of the best movies, it probably could have survived without a single line of dialogue. The first spoken words are actually "Oh, shit," similar to what I said when I saw how much blood can come from a cow's neck. Early visuals, straddling the line between documentary and drama, are striking, painting this world that a spoiled American like me can barely imagine really exists. The style really stands out. The narrative structure is experimental, the editing amateurish, and the editing consistently surprising. This was Djibril Diop Mambety's first movie (of two feature-length films), and it's not a surprise that he's not a classically-trained filmmaker. It feels like he's inventing his style as he goes, and there's almost an outsider artist quality to Touki Bouki that really appealed to me.

The guy has a bitchin' motorbike with a cow skull on it. She's escaping a cackling lady who dances with a knife and screams, "Now kill the goat!" Together, they chase a dream, one floating through the air in the form of a looped snippet of a song about how Paris is "a little piece of heaven on earth" It's a beautiful and possibly heartbreaking love story, sort of like a more chaotic Jarmusch.

Favorite part: a taxi cab driver's reaction to seeing a skull.