Black Girl (1966)

[StevePulaski]

Black Girl (1966)
Directed by: Ousmane Sembène

Mbissine Thérèse Diop in Black Girl.

Rating: ★★★

Ousmane Sembène's minimalist drama Black Girl — widely regarded as the first Sub-Saharan African film to receive international attention, including considerable praise upon release in America — revolves around Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), a Senegalese woman who gets picked up on a street-corner by an upper class French woman (Anne-Marie Jelinek) and employs her to work as a housemaid at her loft on the Riviera. Diouana assumes her role will be taking care of the woman's children, but her transition to a new country is much more volatile. In the home of the woman and her husband (Robert Fontaine) — known only as "Madame" and "Monsieur" for the duration of the picture — Diouana is treated like a slave, tasked with cooking and cleaning for the couple and their wealthy friends without rest and regular meals for herself. Days go by where she doesn't see the children she was told she's care for, and any hope of trying to forge a comfortable life in France is hampered by the strict rules of her employers, namely Madame.

The plot frequently goes back to Diouana's life in Senegal, where she was surrounded by illiterate laborers with murky futures of their own. Flashbacks show her shacking up with a man (Momar Nar Sene) and becoming consumed with joy and happiness upon being the one Madame picks from a couple dozen young women on that aforementioned street-corner. Madame took notice of Diouana's submissive nature as the other women crowded her, trying to increase their chances of being the one the woman selected to get a job and make money. Diouana felt lucky in the moment. It didn't take long for that luck to feel like a curse.

At 55 minutes long, Sembène's lean story loans itself to being immersive almost solely on the basis that every frame and scene feels important. Diouana's dialog is mostly internal, making narration in scenes when she's by herself the primary gateway to her thoughts and feelings in any given situation. Despite being unable to write, her thoughts are concise and measured, and most know that spending time in relative solitude, in an unfamiliar place to boot, you become more acquainted with your thoughts than ever before. Conversations about Diouana and her performance by her employers (I'm struggling not to say "masters," for that's what their relationship is more indicative of) usually happen around her, such as the combative wife expressing vehement disgust about their new maid to her oblivious husband, who at the very least tries, at some points, to be sympathetic to the homesick woman. But Diouana becomes more fragile, and overtime, angry, eventually retaliating in the most permanent way.

A powerful piece of symbolism throughout Black Girl is a traditional African mask that hangs on the wall of the couple's home. Diouana gave it to them when she arrived, and after confirming to herself that she can no longer take the menial labor, she makes her power-move to take it back. You don't have to be an English scholar to see the mask as the most integral aspect of the film's look at colonialism. The dynamics of Diouana and her employers already says so much, but the looming presence of the mask, overlooking the kitchen from the wall, shows the artifacts of a foreign country becoming mere knick-knacks for those in the developed world. The final scene of Sembène's medium-length feature suggests that the repercussions of nations colonizing and stepping on third-world countries in efforts to build themselves up will continue and continue to haunt in equal measure.

Black Girl shows consequences in the stark black-and-whiteness that makes them unambiguous even to audiences who have never seen a film from Senegal. That's what makes it such an accessible feature. It is slim, however, and the the French couple are so caricatured in their roles that they seem to exist on a plain merely to make Sembène's points without further humanizing them beyond being cold, rigid individuals. That strips down what could've ultimately be a more thorough and complicated look at Diouana's relationship with them, but with such a short runtime, and the scenes we get with Madame and Monsieur telling us all we need to know about them through their barked orders and willful ignorance come across as somewhat flaccid.

Conversely, however, without the flab and excess in narrative, Black Girl becomes a more stark picture that breaks down colonialism in a simplistic way that leaves no excuses for ignorance on the part of the audience. Sembène rises above shaming audiences, instead presenting the story with a head-shaking matter of factness that makes it downright impossible to so cleanly brush aside. This was Sembène's first feature, before he went on to direct acclaimed features such as Guelwaar, about African customs, and Moolaadé, a film about female genital mutilation, before dying in 2007 at the age of 84. One can tell he learned a lot from making Black Girl, and that kind of influence and direction isn't the kind you can study, but rather put into practice and see where it goes. Black Girl made it around the world.

Starring: Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Anne-Marie Jelinek, Robert Fontaine, and Momar Nar Sene. Directed by: Ousmane Sembène.