Miss The Right Thing

IN A PERFECT movie culture, Ousmane Sembene's Moolaade would be a major story in such women's publications as Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Essence, Jane and Mademoiselle-who knows, maybe even the front page of the Times' Arts and Leisure. But as our film and media culture operates, the American institutions of female empowerment will not bother with the issues raised by Sembene.

Moolaade follows, with everyday matter-of-factness, the story of Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly), a Senegalese woman who opposes the traditions in her society that restrict the role-even the voices and sexuality-of women. Shouldn't this matter? Unfortunately, the only female experiences that American feminist critics and journalists attend to are those represented by middle-class and primarily white women. This problem isn't simply racism, but also the plain bad taste that automatically elects fraudulent, inhumane, anti-male filmmakers like Jane Campion and Catherine Breillat as standard bearers; thus leaving serious, world-class artists like Sembene ignored.

It's ironic that white feminists who write about film can never bring themselves to consider movies about black women; thus an entire repertoire of movies about human rights issues and struggled-for self-esteem goes unrecognized-from The Color Purple, The Players Club, Beloved, Two Can Play That Game, even this year's Breakin' All the Rules. Sembene's Moolaade is just the most recent addition to this list.

Why must this be so?

In the movies that do spark American feminist interests (crap like In the Cut, Fat Girl, Secretary and Far from Heaven), the concerns are relatively petty and petulant compared to the daily life-or-death struggle that Sembene dramatizes. The intrigue starts when Collé decides to harbor a group of teenage girls who are afraid to undergo the ritual female genital mutilation. She ties a three-colored rope across the entrance to her home, warning the frightened girls not to cross back into subjugation and daring any outsiders to step inside her property to profess their arbitrary rules. The title Moolaade is Wolof for "protection" or "sanctuary"; it's a principle that Collé asserts at a steep price. She is scorned, not only by most of the men in her tribe but also by many women who, out of fear or ignorance, have never questioned their oppressive customs.

Sembene says that Moolaade is part of a proposed trilogy that "embodies the Heroism in daily life." (His previous film Faat Kine observed a freewheeling, independent woman in its title character and a third female-centered film is in the works.) Sembene's description is interesting because he isn't being doctrinaire or p.c. Moolaade conveys the integrity of daily life-not a hysterically cooked-up and frivolous plot like Secretary. Having distilled Collé's dilemma to its essence, showing how personal motive leads to political action, Sembene's film works almost as a fable of how an individual becomes a rebel. Having previously lost a daughter to the circumcision ritual and endured a painful Cesarean section because her own mutilation prevented a normal birth procedure, Collé vows not to participate further. When the actress Coulibaly fixes a hard stare against the village of conformists, her physical stature and determined face epitomize someone standing up virtuously.

Collé seems real but also ideal. Against the risk of censure and rebuke, she dares an impassioned and protective act. She's almost a mythological figure like Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi in Zhang Yimou's Hero except that Sembene insists upon her ordinariness, pointing out that Collé's defiance and her surmises ("Our men want to lock up our minds") make sense as an enlightened response to Senegalese daily life. She is opposed by an intimidating group of women who perform the circumcision and these red-robbed myrmidons recall that gaggle of small-minded society matrons in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance. But the first wife in Collé's household (it follows polygamous Muslim custom) quietly takes her side, a decision suggesting that although this rebellion cannot be called "common sense," it is still recognizable as good sense.

Despite Sembene's slow pace (his cinema follows the deliberateness of Third World oral tradition), Americans should not overlook the thrill inherent in Moolaade's story. But doing so means we have to readjust our Hollywood-warped sensibilities (that reliance on fantasy bred by the industry's condescension). Senegal's rural culture makes the film seem to take place at a chronological distance when, in fact, it is absolutely modern. The village salesman known as Le Mercenaire (Dominique Zeida) sells batteries, dry-crusty bread and a brand of condoms called Prudence. The film has a subtle yet frank awareness of AIDS and sexual custom. Collé submits herself to a brutal bout of conjugal duty; it seems to reinforce her life-saving commitment although-importantly-without betraying any resentment. She stays focused and clear-minded about what is necessary for life.

That's the crucial difference between this movie that reflects feminist ethics and those Western films that spout feminism while flaunting privilege. When the village men confiscate the women's radios, the severity of that move reveals that the domination implied by female circumcision extends further. The men mean to control the women's source of pleasure and information. The radio becomes a multivalent symbol of social oppression. (First of the Month pop critic Benj DeMott likened the burning pile of radios to history's more infamous incident of book-burning.) "We cannot cut ourselves off from the progress of the world," Collé says, trying to rouse the other women in the village. She could also be talking to those sisters abroad who are in desperate need of Sembene's lesson in personal protest and global connection.

The only sign of protest I saw at Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell came when an elderly woman got up and walked out of the screening. It was during the scene where Rocco Siffredi crept into the bedroom of his female sex partner carrying a garden hoe as if he were about to swing an ax. As he inserted the implement's wrong end into his partner's back end, the elderly audience member booked. She didn't get Breillat's joke.

Anatomy of Hell is another of Breillat's quasi-pornographic analyses of the masochism bred in contemporary Western women. Actress Amira Casar plays The Girl who picks up The Man (Siffredi) at a gay disco. They begin an experiment exploring The Girl's sexuality (every orifice plunged, even the drinking of menstrual blood) leading to emotional liberation. Breillat is a serious filmmaker, even though she's prone to spurious statements like "If a woman is defined by her sex, it is through sex, unhindered by its reproductive function and by the social denial of humanity, that she can build her identity." James Toback's trenchant When Will I Be Loved clearly exposes the madness of that thesis by showing that sexuality is only part of one's identity. (Through Neve Campbell, Toback confesses that the most deluded libertines use sex to obscure their social responsibility.)

Breillat has not similarly progressed. Anatomy of Hell is hung up on the same resentment of the bra-burning era. This would be excusable in a young filmmaker but 56-year-old Breillat should know better. Her slogans ("The fragility of female flesh inspires disgust or brutality") is ante-Madonna thinking. This old-fashioned feminism is often laughable as in The Girl's tampon speech "Feel the hygiene of the absorbent cotton." It sounds like ad copy (although when they drink blood you wish they had a V-8, or at least cranberry juice). Breillat puts Casar in Odalisque poses that refute her own thesis. Siffredi steals Anatomy of Hell (and wrecks Breillat's theory about misogyny) by credibly enacting The Man's tortured self-doubt and repentance.

Siffredi's performance (an auto-critique of his own porn career) wouldn't be out of place in Sideways. Alexander Payne's latest film takes male folly as its subject. Payne (who did Election and About Schmidt) is not exactly non-judgmental but his grip on human behavior is saner than Breillat's and almost as perceptive as Sembene's. Why quibble? Payne displays an equal capacity to reprove. His very American characters come alive through their failures. Miles and Jack (Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church) travel Northern California wine country, a last spree before Jack's wedding, where encounters with Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh test their willingness to mature. This Porky's for adults features the year's most refined screenplay (by Payne and Jim Taylor) and judicious pacing. Nothing's wrong with it except it's less exuberant than the test of male folly in Mr. 3000 and less urgent than Sembene's expose of patriarchal arrogance in Moolaade. o