Félicité, Review by Siraj Syed: Cinema réalité

Challenging forms and formats, genres and categories, Félicité agitates your mind by showing too much of some things and too little of other elements. It begins as an indictment of the colonial legacy in Congo but ends up becoming a slave to its repetitive shot-taking and sombre imagery. Too much is promised and just about much is delivered. Nevertheless, Félicité is going to be talked about for its largely credible but definitely faked documentary approach. And, of course, for the Jury Grand Prix it bagged at Berlin.

Félicité is a singer in a bar in Kinshasa and lives with Samo, her 14/15-year-old son. One morning, she receives a phone call from the hospital that Samo had been admitted with serious injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident and risks losing his leg, if Félicité cannot scrape together enough money for the major operation. She sets out into a desperate quest across town, to get the money, by hook or by crook. But just as she is able to scrape together the required amount, her son’s leg has to be amputated, to prevent gangrene from spreading.

Director Alain Gomis (L'Afrance, Andalucia, Tey) wrote the film in collaboration with Olivier Loustau (whose directorial feature debut was La Fille du patron), and Delphine Zingg. It was filmed in six weeks in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Senegal (where the Franco-Senegalese director was born). About 123 minutes long, it is easy to comprehend superficially, but complex enough to demand a second viewing, or a 123 minute meditating mode, peeling layer after layer.

The story is clichéd and the incidents formulaic. Gomis’s treatment and thread-bare screenplay are anything but formulaic. Extremely long duration shots, innumerable close-ups and mid-shots, hazy double images, several scenes in pitch-dark visibility. He plays with you like a teacher would, to try and surprise the student with a completely new insight, and he doesn’t mind the natural consequence of his experiments: detached and increasingly intolerant audiences.

Félicité is for the large part, like a drug trip. If you are not on to drugs or at least not on the same stuff that he is unspooling, the loss is yours. One moment you are convinced that it is the story of the bar singer’s trials and tribulations, the next moment it is biting indictment of the poverty and despair deeply entrenched in Congolese Society, next it side-steps into religion and voodoo, a left then at the good in the raucous, ape of a bar patron, a right at dreamy dark wandering of the singer’s psyche, and a dead-lock between bar music (Kasai Allstars playing themselves) and the puritan Kinshasa Symphonic Orchestra, which appears as a parallel entity in itself. A peek at a gullible lion-heart being conned out of her money, and sledge-hammer in your face as the filming of robbers being beaten to pulp without any point of view, all captured by Céline Bozon’s camera.

Performances are uniformly stark, raw, extra-natural and amazing even while apparently improvising. Congolese singer-turned-actress Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu is the toast of the town, Kinshasa or Mombasa. Gaetan Claudia as Samo is incredible, saying so much without uttering a word almost till the end. Papi Mpaka as Tabu...are you real, or a CGI? Defying all traces of good looks, of good behaviour, he is the unlikely saviour in the sad tale. All those other actors and bit players, you are in great hands. If Gomis has not extracted superlative portrayals, he has done nothing at all.

Becoming a captive of its own unconventionality, Félicité begins to crumble under its own zig-zag frame-work. It’s a must of serious cineastes and students of cinema. To the others, it might end-up being perceived as just another docu-drama, a cinema réalité, exploiting the seedier side of third world have-nots.

Screened for MAMI Film Club members, at the PVR Icon multiplex, Mumbai, on Wednesday, 26^th April, the film is in French and Congolese, with English sub-titles.

Rating: ***

Trailer: https://youtu.be/RQBJkCrS1ww