France 2 - Morocco - 0. No extra time. Which gives me time to get to Cinemateca for the 7.10 screening of Pinho’s film. About which I knew nothing, except that it was set in Africa and was on the long side.
Africa is Guinea Bissau, the Portuguese speaking West African nation. Long is 3 hours 37 minutes. Which is getting up to Angelopoulos levels of long. It starts with a scene that could be out of Antonioni’s Passenger, as Sergio, a white Portuguese man, breaks down on a wind-blown Saharan highway. He is on his way to Bissau, where he is due to deliver a report on the construction of a road which, he is told by a fetching white NGO worker, will threaten the habitat of the last remaining hippopotamuses in the region. His predecessor, in a Bolaño-esque move, has vanished. We never get to see the hippos, but we do get to see just about everything else. There’s a reason this film is so long. It’s because it seeks to faithfully capture every aspect of Sergio’s trip. From a social and anthropological perspective, but also a personal level, as Sergio goes on a voyage of spiritual and sexual discovery.
Of course, there is an angle that says this is excessive. The film should have condensed the material, made a more coherent narrative, reduced the elements. Who wants to sit and watch a film that’s three and a half hours long set in country most viewers outside of West Africa will never have visited. On the other hand, how do you make a film about neo-colonialism and its offset, neo-liberalism? What happens when you simplify the thesis that underpins the film? There are at least three scenes which cut to the heart of the matter. One in a club, when the ‘progressive’ Horacio gives Sergio a lecture on the advantages of development, another with Daria, the woman he fancies who can’t believe he turned down Horacio’s bribe, and a third when Sergio finds himself with a sex worker in the desert, paid for by a Portuguese worker who’s trying to make up for losing his temper with him. This last scene is raw, naked and wilfully on the nose. The sex worker, who speaks perfect English, better than Sergio, berates him for trying to understand and empathise with something that goes beyond his understanding or his capacity for empathy. This is the North-South divide laid bare. The progressive north is like the rich man in the parable. No matter how well-intentioned, its citizens can never truly grapple with the realities of being born in the ‘under-developed’ world.
These scenes, among others, can only play out within the context of Sergio’s journey and the wider world he and we get to know. On their own they would be top-heavy, expositional. But the scale of Pinho’s ambition allows him to incorporate them, pebbles on the river’s floor. This expansive approach permits the film to access so many elements of Guinean society, from the clubs of Bissau to the riverine villages in the mangroves, to the Koltesian outposts in the desert. And this is the short version - there’s a five hour director’s cut!
I walked back from Cinematica in my second world city. O Risa e a Faca is, without doubt, one of the most challenging, astonishing pieces of contemporary cinema I have seen. I realise, in the writing of this, that my perspective is that of the white male European. Perhaps the black, female, non-european would have another take. (There’s a great moment when the black Brazilian drag queen is told s/he’s not black and reacts with annoyance, provoking the question, what exactly does it mean to say someone is ‘black’ or ‘white’ (The Nigerians told me I had black blood in me somewhere, I wasn’t a ghost)). But - parenthesis over - this is a remarkable film which explores the boundaries of our world, and how we can even attempt to speak about those boundaries in a medium with costs that are, for the vast majority of countries, prohibitive.
[Final thoughts - this film seems to sit alongside Martin’s Great Yarmouth and the work of Pedro Costa, (there may be others) suggesting a boldness to Portuguese filmmaking which is going under the radar. - This film is the anti-Sirat. No sudden dramatic thrills. No emotional volte-faces.]
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