Personally, I make films as a matter of urgency. It is vital to be dealing with the real problems of our society. The cinema is a very important medium that can help us understand and solve the problems of our continent. . . I think that before trying simply to please, the cinema should be a mirror in which my compatriots can see themselves and hopefully be moved to change! I am not trying to amuse people; I am trying to transform them by appealing to their collective unconscious. . . The role of the artist in society is to provoke, to denounce. –Moussa Sene Absa

Madame Brouette, the latest film by Senegalese director Moussa Sene Absa, begins with a stunning opening-credit sequence. Woman after brilliantly-clothed woman, enters a small urban square and seats herself around an open rectanglular space. They include, we will see, the primary female characters of the film, dressed in different colors than the others. Few men are present, mainly a small number of griots and musicians, who begin to play music and to sing the following: Hear this ode, beautiful woman! You see, I am your mother. Your tears banish my joy. Now come, take your first steps in life. Wealth may disappear one day, but love is eternal. So come, take refuge in my arms.

The elegant, lovely woman whom we will come to know as Mati, also known as "Madame Brouette" (Mrs. Wheelbarrow), begins to dance in the rectangular space, with her similarly dressed friend Ndaxté and her daughter Ndèye. More and more women join them, surrounded by a clapping, singing crowd, as the action moves to slow-motion and the credits come up. It is a powerful image of female-based social solidarity, which sets the tone and in some ways the style for the movie to come. It represents a kind of ideal, against which the rest of the film will be judged. And if we forget that ideal, the griots will be there to remind us, as they return again and again over the course of the film to break up the narrative and serve as the chorus in a Greek tragedy, obliquely commenting on the story as it unfolds.

We then move the opening of the actual story, and it is a strange opening. Amidst the dust of a Dakar shantytown, a black man in a garish red dress, a blond wig askew on his head, his lips smeared with bright red lipstick, stumbled drunkenly on high heels into a shack, where a woman in traditional dress is crouching with her daughter and baby. He demands to see the baby and she orders him out. She has a pistol, and she is pointing it at him. He takes the gun from her, and we cut to the outside. Along with the neighbors, we soon hear shots coming from inside. In a moment the man in the red dress will depart from the shack in the same drunken manner that he’d entered, but this time will collapse with multiple bullets in his body. What has occurred? Who are these people? What led them to this?

The new film by Senegalese director Moussa Sene Absa is a visually compelling, complex synthesis of social commentary, social satire, pulp fiction, and stylized aesthetics. At the heart of the film is a single character, Mati, Madame Brouette, the young divorcée who supports herself and her daughter by pushing a wheelbarrow around town and selling assorted goods from it. We get to know her in the extended flashback that tells the story. Mati has washed her hands of men, refusing to look to them for support and direction, as would traditionally be expected of her. Mati is played by Rokhaya Niang, who was the apex of the love triangle in Ndeysaan (The Price of Forgiveness), shown in last year’s Festival. In that film, she played an irresistible object of fascination in a traditional village. Here, she is equally beautiful, but different. The recurring image of this beautiful woman, at once slender, graceful, and tough, pushing her wheelbarrow through marketplace and city street, is a powerful one. She does what it takes to survive and perhaps even to get ahead, to fulfill her dream of setting up as the owner of an open-air café and achieving some stability for herself and her daughter, through her own effort.

Along with her daughter, Ndèye and her friend, Ndaxté, Mati has returned to live with her parents amidst the working people of the popular quarters. Her father, a traditional man, clearly has problems with Mati’s unusual status; though he cannot understand her, he clearly loves her, appreciates her, and accepts her—at least for a time. Respected and admired by many of the women around her, she seems to have it all together.

Naago, the policeman with whom she falls in love, is handsome, charming, treacherous, and weak—unable to keep his hands off of every pretty girl he sees or his fingers out of any opportunity for a little profit. He is the foot-soldier for a system of corruption, someone who helps make it all work, but ultimately with little profit for himself. Spending as freely as he steals, he is perennially in debt to the petty crooks with whom he associates. But he is a natural hustler. He knows that the way to Mati is through her daughter, he plays to her and wins her to his side. In fact, he will for a while come between mother and daughter, though that will change.

Naago’s attraction to Mati is evident, yet unclear. She is beautiful, of course, and a conquest, but there is something more there. She obviously represents something in his self-image that he needs to cultivate. He cannot let go of her, cannot completely abandon her, though that would be more his style. She doesn’t trust him, nor should she, but she cannot fully separate herself from him either. The results are lethal.

In many ways, the above story is a banal melodrama, but it does not play that way in the film. The film continually finds ways to stop the narrative to question itself, either by the intrusion of the griot chorus (though "intrusion" is too strong a term; in fact, they blend in naturally with the surroundings and seem very much of part of the world on which they are commenting) or through shifts in time that bring us back to the "present tense" of the film, to the parody of a detective drama in which the truth of Naago’s death is being investigated; the chief investigator is even named "Colombo" (that 1970s television series has been very popular in Africa, as it has throughout the world). In addition, the sheer beauty of the images in the film, the flamboyance of the characters and their situation, serves to impose itself, call attention to itself, and point to larger meanings.

Along with the central images of the communal song and the woman pushing her pushcart, there is the recurring image—visually, through song, and through place-names--of the thiokeer, the partridge, with which Mati is identified. The director has spoken to this correspondence: "For me the woman is sacred. I compare her to a partridge. In the days of royal courts, the partridge was a sacred animal, used in mystical practices because it brought luck and happiness. This bird could not be eaten by just anyone. You had to deserve it. Like a woman. You must deserve her!"

In the end, we find ourselves not so much lost in the illusion of this story of love-gone-bad as caught up in what it all means, this chronicle of a woman seeking to remain free, to empower herself and rise above the world of petty corruption and abuse that surrounds her, yet who also cannot let go of her humanity. By the end of the film, surrounded again by the women who danced with her in the film’s prologue, this quintessential woman finds her own reward.

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This is the third film by Moussa Sene Absa that we have shown in the Festival. Born in Dakar, he has produced a distinctive body of work as a writer, a painter, a musician, and as a film director. He began work as a stage actor and director, then began making films in the late 1980s. His first short film, Le Prix du Mensonge, received the Silver Tanit at the 1988 Carthage Film Festival. His first feature film Ken Bugul, came out in 1991, followed by several more short films--Jaaraama and Set Setal in 1992 and Offrande à Mame Njare 1993. Ça Twiste à Poponguine was released in 1993, followed by a short feature, Yala Yana in 1994. Tableau Ferraille (1997) won a well-deserved award for Best Cinematography at the 1997 Pan-African Film Festival (FESPACO), the top competition for African film. Two documentaries—Jef-Jel (1998) and Blues pour une diva (1999)—followed, along with a popular television comedy series, Gorgorlu.

With Madame Brouette, he established a three-way co-production arrangement, with partners in Canada, France, and Senegal. This co-production arrangement gave him access to financial resources and a high level of technical expertise, while allowing him to retain control of the production. It has won awards at a number of top international film festivals, including Berlin, Milan, Paris, Toronto, and FESPACO.

Along with his film work, Moussa Sene Absa exhibits widely as a painter in Senegal, Europe, and North America. (His painterly eye is easily seen in Tableau Ferraille and Madame Brouette). He continues to live and work in his childhood seaside home of Poponguine, site of his first successful feature, Ça Twiste à Poponguine.