Weddings and funerals are perhaps the most culturally binding practices in place and time. This helps Dao—the sixth feature of the French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis—a fascinating universe that was born in detail, as it presents a memorial to a funeral in West Africa and a wedding in France a year later. The film emphasizes the meaning of culture and the evolution that followed when people left and came back. Still, this sharp focus on migration is delivered with liberating artistry, creating a captivating familiarity that makes the three-hour running time feel like a breeze.
Daoinspired by the Taoist belief in the unceasing movement that flows and unites all things, it is a film of anthropological self-reflection, but also a fascinating exploration of the cinematic process. It begins with Gomis giving a documentary look at his acting—or at least, a glimpse of himself in documentary form—before acting out more intimate parts of his life. The text was inspired by the funeral ceremony of Gomis’ father in the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. The writer-director welcomes us into this personal story by using the lens of his own identity to highlight that film and culture, the individual and the social, are inextricably linked.
It is here, in this pseudo-introduction to the documentary, that we meet several of the movie’s actors as they begin to test and screen test together. This includes the non-professional Katy Corréa, who leads the film in the end, who seems reluctant to participate but which Gomis yearns for. In fact, he asks most of his actors—many of whom are first- or second-generation Africans in France—what kinds of roles they envision playing. Others suggest doctors. Some name sophisticated, ugly vixens. The obvious suggestion that this action is about complex component types, or even real-world functions, is often denied.
Before long, Gomis introduces his bifurcated plot, in which Corréa’s character, middle-aged immigrant Gloria, returns to her small village in Guinea a year after her father’s funeral for a memorial service. And it’s the first time in years that his French-born daughter Nour (D’Johé Kouadio, also glimpsed in the film’s opening) visits the dusty countryside, making it a long overdue opportunity to connect with her roots. However, she no longer speaks the local languages, such as Wolof and Manjak, if she ever learned them in the first place, leaving her mother to act as a translator and cultural guide as she meets aunts, uncles and distant relations.
The two women are greeted with a combination of radiant pride and subtle contempt for the poverty-stricken village, highlighting the ever-complex dynamics of post-colonial migration and the inevitable class dimension. It is here, while introducing Nour to her relatives—who inevitably remark on how much she has grown—that Gloria also mentions her daughter’s upcoming wedding next year. This moves us quickly through the wedding and its fertile countryside, as the plot reveals itself to be a cinema vérité depiction of each series of events as they might naturally unfold.
Cutting vividly back and forth between the wedding and the day-long memorial, Gomis vividly weaves together the two halves of Nour and Gloria’s lived experience with extended scenes of family gatherings and song and dance. He captures these parallel stories with the same warmth he brought to his Congolese family drama with beautiful music. Félicitéwhich in 2017 won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale. Although Dao left this year’s festival empty-handed—surprisingly—remaining a major contribution to contemporary African cinema.
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The DAO ★★★1/2 (3.5/4 stars) |
There is no shortage of conversations in the village about the lingering effects of colonial rule, and no shortage of negative interactions, such as an estranged cousin arriving at Nour’s reception with a surprise pregnant girlfriend. This leads to a lot of heated exchanges and eventually a nice argument. Gomis arranges everything with such free-flowing verve that it feels neither academic nor overly chaotic, but completely natural, as if he’d just walked into a real family and started filming.
Gomis constructs each extended scene with great care, both in the moments themselves and in the way they adhere to the larger back-and-forth structure. The result is usually happy. The aforementioned fisticuffs, despite their rudeness, become the subject of some of the most exciting filmmaking you’ll likely see all year, set against a jazzy soundtrack that matches the nature of the improvised movie. Back in the motherland, the instruments traditionally take on certain tones, but the basics are always clashing: rhythm and percussion, joy and uncertainty.
However, the biggest difference between the two parts of the film is perhaps the level of focus on each culture. The village’s monuments are centuries old, and Nour learns their meaning for the first time as each culture unfolds. On the contrary, his marriage is a fusion of cultures, both French and West African, with popular English-language tunes and even a cappella ensemble sung in a beautiful way. As much as Dao it is a film about death, and, as its title suggests, a film about cultural rebirth and finding oneself in times of uncertainty—not just individually, but collectively—and mustering concrete objects and ideals to overcome them.
And yet, despite the film highlighting the differences between native and foreign cultures, the very roots of culture go back to their end in a clear way. Gomis never measures and avoids didacticism by using a strong presentation of the traditional beliefs of the village, which, when it comes to the memory of the dead, focuses on obtaining certainty through a spiritual meal to better understand how the deceased died and what he left behind. No matter where Gomis places his camera—where he’s from or where he’s going—he finds people at their most vulnerable, reconnecting with old friends and loved ones and preserving or creating rituals to deal with the uncertainty of existence itself.
In all of this, Gomis’s filmmaking embodies the very idea of Dao-a perpetual spiritual movement that brings people together despite historical turmoil. The result is a simple documentary work full of sense of occasion. When it starts, you may have little idea who it is. But after three hours, it feels like you’ve spent your whole life with these families that now feel like yours.
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