Intertwined by powers too great and stupid to contradict
dir: Baloji
2023
The actual title for this in English is Omen, but I went with the French-Walloon title because I didn’t want it to be confused with one of the multitude of Omen horror flicks that are out there in the wild.
At first, as Koffi (Marc Zinga) and his wife Alice (Lucie Debay) travel back to Koffi’s hometown of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I wondered if this was going to be one of those many films that’s about someone introducing someone to their family, only for everyone to have a heart attack, and endure hours of culturally or linguistically-based misunderstandings before eventually coming to accept things, and come to terms with things, and everyone hugs in the end.
Even though the form predates the movies entirely, I do selfishly think of it as the My Big Fat *insert ethnicity as required* Wedding format. This film… does not follow that path, to say the least.
The Democratic Republic of Congo seems like… a complicated place. Koffi hasn’t been back home for 18 years, which I’m guessing means he’s in his mid thirties, and has been happily living in Belgium all this time. His pregnant wife Alice, is pretty clearly not Congolese, but she is Belgian, so at least they have that in common. As I alluded to before, they are nervous to meet with Koffi’s family, especially his mum Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua) and his dad Abel (some guy always out of shot, existing only offscreen), and they have good reason to.
The celebration they get to is surprisingly unwelcoming, so I guess it’s not in their honour. Look, I’m a fairly sensitive and paranoid kind of chap, always assuming that I’m the one at fault when misunderstandings happen or when things go wrong – I don’t think people are out to get me: I assume I’m out to get myself. Watching Koffi go through what he goes through with his family, be rebuffed, and then have things go even worse (though thankfully not in a violent sense, though it’s very close to the line) is like every paranoid person’s nightmare. It goes about as bad as one could imagine, and it’s not because of anything Koffi deliberately does.
Yes, a lot of it has to do with the superstitiousness of these people and this place. Rural Lubumbashi doesn’t seem like a place overflowing with appreciation for science or rational arguments. Koffi is doomed before he ever crossed the threshold: for stuff completely out of his control. His mother’s meanness and coldness isn’t explained until late in the film, and yet mostly all of his problems seem to stem from the fact that he has a birthmark on his cheek which these superstitious yokels think means he’s marked by the devil, which is why he had to leave in the first place.
A birthmark? A facial difference? How dumb are the superstitions of these tribal folks?
Well, the saddest thing, is that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how irrational these beliefs are, there is no way around them for Koffi and Alice. That’s it, that’s just it.
Sometimes, there is no way to resolve certain issues, there’s just no coming together and accepting each other – there’s familial and social exclusion, and self-interested bullying, and that’s it. Koffi hopes to ingratiate himself with his father especially, and his family in general, including his “uncles”, who seem to run everything behind the scenes, and in front of the scenes as well, and none of it works.
They’re not even that interested in the dowry payment he has saved up to offer them. It’s not clear to me as to why he has to pay his own family a dowry on behalf, presumably, of his wife, but far be it from me to question the dumb patriarchal customs of tribal jerkwads. That would be culturally insensitive at best and perhaps racist at worst.
To Alice, though, none of this is theoretical. She questions, having seen the bonkers way Koffi’s extended family has reacted to his presence, whether Koffi can even be capable of being a loving husband and father, having come from this horrible parochialism, but clearly, however much Koffi wishes there was resolution, it’s something he’s going to have to come up with at a distance. Probably back in Belgium, one would think.
At least he gets along with his younger sister Tshala (Elaine Umuhire), who has her own problems dealing with her family, because of her sexual orientation, which is frowned upon by her conservative traditionalist parents.
Thankfully Koffi and his wife can stay with Tshala, not being welcome in the parental home, until they can get the fuck out of Dodge, but Tshala herself is about to move to South Africa swearing off on the possibility of moving to Europe. She scorns such an idea. To many people, moving to the place that colonised your country in order to get something back for all that imposed misery and resource extraction makes perfect sense. To others it couldn’t make less. Tshala’s no more inclined to move to Europe to live and work than she is to stay.
She is in a relationship with a jerk who have given her a STD, but I had the strong impression that Tshala is actually gay or bisexual, but living in a country where it is frowned upon at the very least, and not actively prosecuted (like some adjacent countries on this continent) yet at worst. There is a phone message she listens to which implies if she gets to South Africa, and gives the flick to her philandering fuckboy truck-driving partner, she’ll get to live the life she wants.
But I could be reading slightly too much into it. Her (hilarious and delightful, yet mean) sisters criticise her for living the polyamorous lifestyle, and recommend a local witch doctor when she comes down with the clap or something similar. And against all her better judgement, she and her man both go to this ill-advised appointment, which results in the movie poster image above, and a conversation along the lines of “what the fuck is going on, why did we agree to this?”
And I never even find out if the ‘treatment’ worked. Who knows, it could have?
Parallel to these story aspects with Koffi and his family, there is a surreal story about a rivalry between a teenage gang leader called Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya), and his mortal enemy Simba (Mordecai Kamangu). I cannot even begin to describe the surreality of this storyline. Oh, wait, sure I can.
Paco and his gang, the Goonz, wear pink dresses, tutus and tiaras. Simba and his gang dress in leopard print motifs, which mostly make them look like African dictators. Simba’s throne sits in front of a mountain of black coil waste, tailings, I think they’re called, in a space where contests are held.
The thing about Paco’s gang is…I’m not sure that the flick is implying or outright saying there a crew of gender fluid crims expressing their true identities in between committing crimes. Paco’s whole deal seems to be that in losing his sister Maya, he has made his entire focus in life honouring his absent sister by dressing like her and making the other Goonz dress like her.
Paco, having lost the safety of his hideout (in a bus), dreams of what happened to him and his sister as they wandered in a jungle/forest, and came upon a hut from which billowed pink smoke, and they found that the walls of the hut were edible. Lo and behold a witch appeared and enticed them inside with the promise of more food.
If that sounds vaguely familiar, well, yes, it’s that famous Congolese story of Paco and Maya, sorry, I meant, Hansel and Gretel. Whatever actually transpired, Maya is no more, and Paco misses her terribly. His war with his enemy stems from the continued disrespecting of his sister’s memory, and there’s only one solution for that.
I wish I could say that the multiple stories thread together nicely but I don’t really think they do, only because this is one of the rare occasions where I wish a film was a half hour longer, at least. Augure is so enjoyable (to me) to watch and so consistently powerful / compelling in its imagery, that I wanted much more about these people and their lives.
But then I also appreciate a flick that tells its story and doesn’t stretch things out needlessly. To be really clear, this is not a flick about contemporary life in the Democratic Republic of Congo, nor is it about the conflict that’s killed millions of Congolese and Rwandans, and displaced millions more. It’s one of the most resource rich countries on the continent, and the poorest. The mines, one of which plays so great a part in this story, and not only visually, now aren’t owned by the European powers, or the Belgian crown: those cobalt mines are owned by the Chinese government, who we all know hate the idea of human rights abuses and child labour.
And yet this flick isn’t about that. The problems faced by Koffi and his family have more to do with their belief systems and local power structures, and long held prejudices, and of course the irrational belief in sorcery, which touches everyone’s lives in such malign ways. And about how families are a prison to escape from, sometimes, rather than going back again and again hoping for a different outcome, and never getting it
Even after all of that, it’s such a beautiful, well shot film. The cinematography by Joachim Phillipe is astounding, whether it’s a desert plain, a coal mountain, an illuminated tree behind a charging station for people’s devices (that makes big business during nightly blackouts), a riverbank along a polluted river that is entirely made of fabric, a field of burning scarecrows, or a blackened room filled with women performatively wailing for a recently deceased. It’s astounding, a real artistic achievement which also manages to be thematically strong, telling a story that doesn’t seem autobiographical but still feels deeply felt by the director. It’s pretty amazing.
8 times this flick augurs well for Baloji’s career as a director out of 10
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“I wonder how we can love when we haven’t learned.” - Augure
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