It accuses the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, G8 and the World Trade Organization (WTO) of keeping Africa poor by draining Africa's resources away from its own sustenance and development in order to repay debts incurred to exploit and export African resources in ways that work against African life. With one woman trenchantly making the point that Africa has become the victim of its own riches, it accuses the rest of the world of getting rich off Africa, dictating the terms in a lopsided power equation, making Africans demonstrably worse off less educated, less cared for by a diminished health system, deeper in debt than ever. And yes, there are plenty of Africans helping them do it.
To help the staged proceedings avoid the trap of unrelieved didacticism, Sissako injects bits of daily life that spill in and out of the court and courtyard and its periphery. Chickens and goats make their way obliviously around the robed, wigged judges (played by real judges and lawyers) in the dusty enclosure, heightening the absurdity and theatricality. Spectators chat. Some fall asleep under the hot sun. Sissako juggles humor and poignancy, inserting shots of a man dying of AIDS and a beautiful nightclub singer (Aissa Maiga) whose marriage to a bewildered husband is corroding, with the fate of their family left hanging as she sings her heart out in half-empty nightclubs.
A French defense lawyer uses a break in the proceedings to haggle with a street vendor over a pair of sunglasses he complains are fake Guccis. A corrupt cop placidly plays out his daily routines. A gun emerges, momentarily raising the stakes. Inexorably, a picture arises of an Africa stuffed with goods and people caught in a spiral of declining living standards as Africans lose control over those small parts of their infrastructure and resources owing to misrule by native African elites. At one point the trial is halted by the entrance of a wedding party, the grim gravity of the snowballing indictment interrupted by festive energies.
Bamako may sound like a hodge-podge. Actually, it's complex, subtle and intricately crafted. The seemingly disconnected parts resonate, thematically knit together, as Sissako's intellect reins in his moral outrage, until its seemingly conflicting elements mesh into a juggernaut of a whole, with the film's point of view coming to us not as a screed, but as felt knowledge, the fruits of experience ruefully learned at high cost.
Witness after witness adds to the verbal mosaic, often in languages many seated on the benches and folding chairs do not know. Language itself and by extension tribal perspective -- is seen as a separating influence among Africans ever more sorely in need of communal and collective action. The distancing helps the film retain its heat. Bamako, in which each day's camera and microphone setups are seen, is as Brechtian as it is African, deliberately making its artifice part of its esthetic, making alienation one of its weapons. It's brought home with piercing effectivness in the testimony of a parched old man, pouring a lifetime of accumulated anguish over the proceedings in a tongue nobody but him understands. But nobody can fail to understand the weight of pain and suffering in his voice and in his face.
Yet even here, Sissako refuses to let sentimental and unexamined accusations weaken the film or its arguments. And ferociously as he glares at global capitalism and its agents, Sissako isn't about to let Africans off the hook by allowing them to seem sanctified victims. Africa's complicity in its own subjugation, apart from its own bloody history of corruption and misrule and mutual extermination, is indicated when the villagers disconnect the speakers broadcasting the proceedings to those outside the packed courtyard on the grounds that the testimony has droned on too long and has become boring.
It's more vividly brought home in a heightened insert, a mock Western titled Death in Timbuktu, in which American cowboys ride into an African village, Wild Bunch-style, spraying the place with bullets, killing women and children. Thus does Western pop culture, eagerly soaked up by Africans, become one of the nails being hammered into Africa's coffin. The head gunslinger in the film-within-a-film, incidentally, is played by Danny Glover, who also co-produced. Thusly, and by playing the guy fighting the bad fight in the ultra-violent parody, does he fight the good fight. There are no consolations in Bamako, and there's plenty of guilt to go around. But Sissako imaginatively and potently powers up his ambitious hot-wired indictment with a cool virtuosity that keeps us riveted.
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by Jay Carr
