Saloum

dir: Jean Luc Herbulot

2021

There is a lot of insanity going on here.

For much of this flick’s length, I felt like I was watching something so cool, so different from anything I’d seen before, something steeped in cleverness and difference, but within a startling cinematic form, from places where films like this rarely arise (not that I would know – I mean that rise to prominence outside of where it was made).

And eventually I came back down to Earth. It’s just a film. As great as the melding of form, function, place, history, cool looking dudes is, and as refreshing as it is for a revenge tale, the way everything is resolved felt unfulfilling.

And yet everything I will say from now on isn’t going to really capture the magnitude of why I found this flick so impressive. I think it will remain hard to explain.

I know nothing about the director, but I know he’s seen some films. He has definitely seen the films (or at least enough scenes from them) of Sergio Leone. And though he’s from the Republic of Congo, and studied and worked in France, he is drawn to telling a very strangely specific story about a trio of guys who find themselves trapped in the Saloum region of Senegal.

The stuff I’m going to write is going to sound quite specific and quite strange, but I assure you most of it is reasonably accurate. The film starts in 2003, during a coup d’etat in Guinea-Bissau. A trio of mercs runs around what looks like piles and piles of corpses in the streets, wearing slick grey-silver slickers, wielding weapons. When we see one soldier stir amidst the dead, one of the mercs, with white dreads, blows a powder into his face, knocking him the fuck out.

They proceed to a room where there’s a Mexican drug dealer who has a suitcase full of gold bars, and it seems their job all along has been to extract the racist jerk from this place and take him north to Dakar in Senegal, so he can get back to, I dunno, macramé and drug dealing in his spare time.

I don’t think the mercs were responsible for the coup (in the film, I mean, not in ‘real life’) – though that’s maybe why they’re there to extract Felix (Renaud Farah). As they fly to their destination, the plane loses fuel, and they have to come down in a region of Senegal they think is cursed.

The three chaps, the three amigos, these three Bangui’s Hyenas, are thick as thieves. They never really argue with each other that much, but they do disagree occasionally. Chaka (Yann Gael) seems like the youngest of the three, but seems maybe to be their leader. They defer to him at least. Rafa (Roger Sallah) acts like he thinks he’s the coolest of the trio, but that’s only because his sunglasses, mohawk and machete combination look really, really on point.

Last is Minuit (Ba Mentor), who is some kind of mystic with his massive dreadlocks, but he seems, whatever his propensity and comfort with violence might be, here is called a marabout, or someone with the skills to both pay the bills and the power to repel evil spirits and such.

When they end up at a place called the Baobab Resort and are greeted by a charming host called Omar (Bruno Henry), Rafa and Minuit think it’s a terrible fucking idea, but Chaka thinks it’s great, and suggests that they pretend to not be who they are, and to charm these rubes into thinking they’re just bodyguards to a gold miner, being Felix.

He also tells them, and Omar, that he remembers him.

Uh oh. What?

Oh, okay. I didn’t forget the actual opening images of this beautiful, confronting movie: a child, a chain dangling from one arm, a massive silver revolver dangling from the other, flees from something, someone terrible. As the child flees, a voice intones sombre words about revenge. In this part of the world, the weight of revenge itself is considered to be heavy enough such that the bearer of the burden always drowns.

Not the person who is the object of that revenge, who provokes it, who did the awful thing at first, but the one seeking revenge.

Chaka wants revenge, Chaka needs revenge. Chaka seems to have engineered matters such that they would get their opportunity to “visit” with Omar.
The other two chaps aren’t happy with it, but they go along with it. Omar seems to have a strange policy for the guests at Baobab. They don’t have to pay anything to stay there, but they do have to help out around the place: If you have some shots at the bar, you have to clean the bar.

The next day, after a fitful night of nightmares, all the guests at the place have to do chores around not just Baobab, but in town as well. The chores are…strange. Some chores require the delivery of medicines to some guys who don’t have ears. Other chores require using BB guns to shoot (white) fishermen poachers who use dynamite in the rivers and lakes, in the butt, to dissuade them from what they’re doing.

Felix is made to plant mangroves in order to improve the biodiversity in one of the areas and save the coastline. He, a mean drug leader, doesn’t seem to see the ecological value of doing so. Lucky for him the local police captain (Ndiaga Mbow) is there to both explain the importance of this process to him, but also to point out that he knows who all of them are, and he plans to fuck their day up very soon.

There’s so much specificity to the location, to what they say about it, to what the conflicts are around this and many other adjacent regions, and then, at dinner, people quote and argue about the famous words of Thomas Sankara, assassinated former president of Burkina Faso, whose Marxist pan-African views still seem to have some currency, or at least did in 2003.

There’s so much going on and being talked about, complex themes about colonialism and de-colonisation, waves and currents of conflicts and tensions between all these people, and then Chaka, ignoring all of the signs, ignoring his best buddies, cannot stomach Omar’s continued existence among the living any longer.

He kills the monster that is / was Omar, and hell on Earth is unleashed. Well, hell on Saloum, I guess.

I guess this was, after all, a horror film. It’s just that, up to this bit, it didn’t feel like a horror film, or sound like one. The descent into abject horror, like evil spirits that manifest as clouds of, I dunno, black leaves or something, with horns chasing after people, trying to get into their ears in order to poison them into dying or something else – it didn’t feel as strong as what came before, even if I guess all the point of everything prior to that was to explain why this was now happening, because of what Chaka had done.

The strongest element remains the bond between the three men, even and especially once it gets to a point where one of them sacrifices himself to save the other two guys. As moving as that was – I didn’t understand how or why that helped them, or kept the evil spirits at bay.

Watching people trying to use machetes or their guns against clouds of leaves also isn’t that interesting or exciting on an action-y or visceral level. I will allow that my ignorance of Senegalese stories or myths probably contributes to the lack of resonance on my part, because, wow, it did very little for me.

It also highlights the fact that a lot of this other stuff is just window-dressing that fills up time but doesn’t really serve that much of a purpose story-wise. One of the people at the resort is hearing There is a deaf mute woman at the resort who figures out who the Hyenas are before everyone else, and she uses sign language to tell Chaka that if she doesn’t take her with them, she’s going to tell the cops. Very conveniently, because the Hyenas can do everything and are so cool, having worked in mines when they were younger means they know sign language as well(?) This character of Awa (Evelyne Ily Juhen) seems like she’s going to contribute in some meaningful way, or do something cool, but…

It also helps, and it’s convenient, that being deaf means the spirits can’t get into her head, literally, which is great for her but doesn’t really help anyone else.

The ending is pretty unambiguously sad for one of the main characters, because it kind of implies that the escape they thought they made as a child was only over going to be temporary, because the evils of Saloum and of slavery will never end.

I guess that’s an important message for all of us? All I can say is that, at least this Saloumi Delta part of the world looks amazing, and deliberately tries to eschew the kind of nature doco stuff we might be used to from endless hours of Sir David Attenborough droning on about some animal or some plant on the fucking Serengeti or in the forests of Madagascar.

It’s nothing like here. Bleak and foreboding, but bright and vibrant, somehow.

Saloum… was something of an enigma. I wish… there was more budget, or more options with the later part of the flick, different ways it could have been realised. But I would love love love to see another film by this director and with some or many of these actors again.

Possibly in the same setting. I mean, how many films have any of you seen from Senegal?

That’s what I thought.

7 times I bet they were dying to call this Once Upon a Time in Senegal out of 10

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“We say that revenge is like a river whose bottom is reached only when we drown.” - Saloum