One could reasonably describe Mati Diop’s fascinating hybrid as an experimental film. The French-Senegalese film-maker, whose Atlantics stormed Cannes in 2019, has certainly not taken the conventional approach while pondering an increasingly contentious area of postcolonial discourse. But this remains a lucid piece of work that lays out its arguments in sharp fashion.
Dahomey deals with the gestural return of 26 historically significant objects – out of many thousands – to the nation of Benin from the French authorities. Diop films the artefacts being packed away. She follows them to the museum in their home country. She restages a debate between university students about the greater meaning of the repatriation.
The cool, often static shots and unhurried editing are characteristic of a school of documentary film-making that allows the viewer complete freedom to shuffle significances. There is a beauty in the empty precision. The subsequent debate allows no such vagueness, however. These bright students seem fired with fury about the obscuring of a past that encompassed a wealth of culture and martial adventure. This is where the brawling in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s recent The Woman King was set.
Diop has noted that, as an African woman raised in Paris, she was surprised to hear how those who grew up Benin felt almost as cut off from their heritage as she was. So many of the physical objects that would have made the link sat in places such as the French capital’s Musée du Quai Branly. At least one person in the debate observes dryly that the current conversation is being carried out in French.
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What really sets Dahomey apart, however, is the director’s decision to put words in the mouth of a wooden statue of the 19th-century ruler King Ghézo. Written and narrated by the Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, the elliptical monologue – mournful and confused – emerges in a subelectronic burble that seems weathered by the centuries. One thinks of the great 1987 song Jerdacuttup Man, by the Australian band The Triffids. “Shrivelled and black and my bandage is torn,” the eponymous Aboriginal mummy murmured from his own case in the British Museum. “But my fingers are cold. Won’t you please take me home?”
Dahomey is on limited release from Friday, October 25th
