BAMAKO

The World Bank, an international alliance of financial institutions whose appointed aim is eliminating poverty across the globe, has accrued quite a bit of bad PR of late. Most stories were directed at the internal shake-up brought on by accusations levied against its former President, Paul Wolfowitz. Amidst allegations of financial improprieties in connection to a rather large handout delivered to a former colleague (cronyism that seems to plague the current administration with each new appointment), Abderrahmane Sissako, a Malian director who recently served on the Jury of the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, and whose previous films include the sublime LIFE ON EARTH, has arrived with a new film that couldn’t be more timely in its dissection of the World Bank’s policies on that of the Third World.

Every once in a great while a film so original and so daring comes along that makes everything that came before it seem stale and uninspired. BAMAKO, a socially conscious hybrid of unrestrained melodrama, neo-realist circumspection and surreal homage, is such a film. Sissako’s films may be politically direct, but they are rarely told in anything resembling a linear, matter-of-fact manner. It’s the ingenious and unexpected connections between their various strands that make this Malian director master of the non-traditional narrative format.

Loosely structured around a trial taking place in Mali, a former French colony and one of many desperately impoverished African countries whose very existence depends heavily on foreign aid (i.e. institutions like the World Bank), BAMAKO puts on trial the very institution responsible for its disintegration. All the powdered wigs and formality make for a kind of farcical bridge over troubled waters, but the matters being discussed here are deadly serious. When the judges hear testimony from numerous local residents, the impassioned pleas do little to sway them. The court’s appointed representatives are so bogged down in the bureaucracy of it all that they routinely fail to see that the proof lies right in front of their eyes.

Lest the film risk falling into a single, overtly politicized category, Sissako throws in a Spaghetti Western for good measure. In keeping with that Italian film genre’s cultural fluidity, the director casts Danny Glover and Elia Suleiman, an award-winning Palestinian filmmaker, in rival gunmen roles. The metaphor is hard to miss, but Sissako complicates such easy readings with trenchant observations of his cigar-chomping, six-shooter-wearing characters, examining the effect of the World Bank’s continued profligacy through a wide swath of bloodthirsty cultural representatives. Sissako, of course, is far too intelligent to simply rail against Western dominance and capitalism as the key to all of Africa’s woes. Instead, he provides links to both the internal and external forces that result in all participating nations being short-changed to varying degrees.

BAMAKO’s microscopic attention to detail results in a third narrative strand arising in the film. Amidst the constant finger-wagging and pork barreling taking place inside the courtroom, the daily routines and natural beauties of African life gradually emerge. It is outside this stifling atmosphere where we follow Melé (played by the Malian-Senegalese actress Aïssa Maïga in an achingly brilliant performance), who makes her living singing late nights in a neighborhood bar and provides a kind of true-to-life corollary to the litany of hypotheticals and test cases offered up by the various arbiters in the film. What perhaps makes BAMAKO so extraordinary is the ability it possesses to link broad social issues with their repercussions on the level of families and individuals like Melé and her struggle to live. As we’ve been shown time and time again, people rarely respond to statistics, no matter how bleak a portrait they paint. It takes the stories of individuals for people to finally stand up and take notice.

The World Bank, despite the nobility of its stated goals, is so wrapped up in its own in-fighting and self-interests that it has made little headway in the developing nations BAMAKO so meticulously portrays. Without a leader and a nation that can stand above the unilateral bickering and mitigating influence of corporations, it stands little chance of combating such a monumental and complex scourge of humanity. As for the future, much of it lies in the hands of the World Bank’s new President. And who, by the way, has our Commander in Chief chosen as the worthy, impartial successor? Robert B. Zoellick, a long-time friend of the Bush administration and a top-tier executive at Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s largest global investment banks.

– Jameson West, Associate Programmer, Austin Film Society