A CHILD’S LOVE STORY/UN AMOUR D’ENFANT (Senegal, 2004, 93 min.), directed by Ben Diogaye Beye; screenplay by Ben Diogaye Beye; cinematography by Maurice Giraud; music by Wassis Diop; edited by Abdellatif Raïss; with Anta Sylla (Yacine), Mafall Thioune (Omar), Sega Beye (Demba), Habib Diara (Layta), and Fatou Diouf (Ngoné), Fatou Fall (Maty, the Beggar Girl), Mamadou Sane (Young Beggar Boy), and Omar Seck (Big Laye). In Wolof and French with English subtitles.
A Child’s Love Story, the second feature
film by veteran director Ben Diogaye Beye, isn’t really much of a story. Set at the end of the school year in
The film
opens with two boys getting ready for school.
At first we only see them through their shoes—one is lacing up his white
sneakers, the other wears blue plastic sandals.
On the soundtrack are the sounds of the street—this is a world in which
“inside” is not much separated from “outside,” no matter how fancy the house. The boy with the sneakers is Omar, the film’s
central male character, and he is rushing through breakfast in order to be able
to intercept the path of his friend Yacine, his best
friend even though she is a girl. Yacine’s is the best-off family among the circle—her father
has a good job, he is thinking of sending her off to an elite high school, they
have TV and a nice car. But there is
nothing of the snob about Yacine—she is a hard-working
girl, with a ready smile and at times a sharp tongue, though she always tries
to think the best of people; and she is very attached to Omar, with whom she
shares a friendly competition for best in class. Omar reciprocates her feelings. They love to be together. It is not easy for
them to articulate or even pinpoint their feelings. Omar tries to do so, using
the conventional language of adults, but it will ultimately get him into
trouble and temporarily jeopardize their relationship.
The second
pair of shoes belong to Demba,
who is a complicated kid. Well-off, not
too good in school, using bluster to mask his insecurity, he has a secret known
to none of the other children. While he
swears to his friends that he would never have anything to do with beggars, we
know the truth: he is secretly attracted
to Maty, the daughter of a blind beggar woman who
comes around to their home every day for a handout. He longs for the slightest bit of contact with
her, just the touch of her hand as he is passing sugar or biscuits to her.
The third
boy in the group, Layti, is the opposite of Demba. With Layti, what you see is what you get. Tall, strong, and a good-natured dreamer, he
has one goal: to go to
Many of the
scenes in the film would be familiar to most of us: rivalries at a pre-adolescent dance party;
boys boasting about their prowess with girls, yet hiding their secret
affections; kids playing “She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not” (here with a
Senegalese twist involving the leaves of an Ice Petal plant and a
near-guarantee that it will predict that “She Loves Me”); boys measuring their
“zizis” to see who is the best-endowed; kids finding
ingenious ways to cheat at school; kids getting caught in humiliating
situations; kids impulsively saying and doing things that they later regret.
At the same time, though, there is
much in this film that speaks directly to the African urban experience—mediated
by a child’s perspective. Behind the
relatively calm exterior of these children’s lives lies a good deal of harsh
social reality: workers on strike, the effects of globalization, police
brutality, poverty and the lack of a social safety net (other than
begging). Yacine’s
family appears to be the most stable of all, yet even their position is ultimately
tentative and fragile. When her father
nearly loses his job as a result of globalization (i.e., decisions by the World
Bank), the family is forced to relocate to the distant city of
Two of the other
characters in the film are particularly important in this respect. One of the positive role models for the
children is “Big Leye,” an older man who rents out
bikes at the seaside. Himself a top
student when he was young, he was falsely accused of cheating and expelled from
school—and as is typical in the
The second
character to embody social reversal is a young beggar boy who keeps showing up
in the film, drawn in some way to young Layti. There is something about him that reminds Layti of something, which only becomes clear at the end of
the film. It appears that the two of
them were students together at a Koranic school long
ago. Things obviously worked out for Layti and his family in a way that they did not for the
other boy. Layti
was able to go to “
Still,
overall it is the “sweet” side of “bittersweet” that ultimately characterizes
the tone of this lovely little film. Despite
all that separates them in the end, Omar and Yacine
have found a poetic, magical way to keep their friendship intact. In the words of Yacine,
“My mom said my dad lost his job because of World Bank, but even the Bank
cannot keep us apart. Our friendship is
stronger than the World Bank.”
* * *
Ben Diogaye Beye has made a career of media work. Along with his work in film, he has been a
radio broadcaster-producer for Radio
He first worked as an assistant
director on about ten Senegalese and foreign films including Touki-Bouki by Djibril Diop Mambéti. He co-authored the
film Sarah et Marjama
by Axel Lohman, which was shot in
He made his first short film, Les
Princes Noirs de Saint-Germain-des-Prés (1975), in
In 1980 Ben Diogaye
Beye wrote, produced and directed Sey, Seyti/A
Man and Some Women, his first feature-length film, which questions the
practice of polygamy in
A Child’s Love Story, Beye’s second feature-length
film, released in 2004, won the UNICEF Award for the Promotion of Children’s Rights,
at the Festival Panafricain du
Cinéma de
--Notes by Michael Dembrow