‘Dancing the Twist in Bamako’ Evaluate: Youth in Revolt

“Bliss was it in that daybreak to be alive,” William Wordsworth wrote concerning the early days of the French Revolution. “However to be younger was very heaven!” “Dancing the Twist in Bamako,” a brand new characteristic from the French filmmaker Robert Guédiguian, nimbly captures each the form of youthful ecstasy Wordsworth recalled and the disillusionment that so typically follows.

It’s the early Nineteen Sixties, and the Republic of Mali (previously French Sudan) is within the first flush of post-colonial optimism, having declared independence from France a number of years earlier than. Samba (Stéphane Bak) spends his days spreading the Marxist gospel promoted by the nation’s president, Modibo Keïta, and his evenings on the Pleased Boys’ Membership, one in every of many nightspots in Bamako, Mali’s capital, that cater to the native urge for food for Western pop music.

Wearing miliary-style fatigues, Samba and his comrades drive out to rural villages to lecture peasants and landowners on the virtues of collective agriculture. They’re as smitten by selling the trigger as having enjoyable, and at first there appears to be no contradiction between politics and pleasure. It’s the ’60s! Within the bed room Samba shares together with his music-obsessed brother, Badian (Bakary Diombera), there are posters of Ho Chi Minh and Otis Redding. Socialism and soul music look like two sides of the identical coin.

Finally, all of the posters will probably be torn down, and Samba’s expertise will spin from disappointment to hazard to tragedy. Guédiguian, a lot of whose earlier movies have been set in and across the French port metropolis of Marseille, has a jaunty, barely old style method with narrative. The plot of “Dancing the Twist” is busy, the feelings huge, and the display typically as crowded with character and incident as a web page of Dickens.

On the heart is the love story between Samba and Lara (Alice Da Luz). The daughter of a lower-caste household, she has been compelled into marriage with the loutish, drunken grandson of a village chief, a situation she tries to flee by stowing away in Samba’s truck. He helps her discover work and a spot to remain in Bamako, and shortly they’re essentially the most dazzling couple on the Pleased Boys’ Membership. Samba is assured that the patriarchal traditions oppressing Lara will probably be swept away by President Keïta’s new order, simply as certainly because the highly effective retailers and feudal bosses will share their wealth with the employees and peasants.

Samba, whose father is a affluent material producer, is a protégé of the minister of youth. Restrictive commerce insurance policies cut up the younger man’s loyalties between these two paternal figures — simply one of many tensions that begin to undermine his optimism, and the intense future he and Lara symbolize. Her husband and brother are looking for her in Bamako, and a culturally conservative faction within the authorities has determined that European vogue and American rock ’n’ roll are corrupting Mali’s youth and begun a crackdown on the golf equipment.

In a defiant speech to a room filled with officers, Samba paraphrases Lenin, declaring that “Socialism is the Soviets, plus electrification, plus the twist!” To take one other web page from the left-wing songbook, he desires bread and roses, too. However his exuberant romanticism places him more and more at odds together with his comrades, who’re extra within the chilly train of energy than within the pleasure of liberation.

“Dancing the Twist in Bamako” is completely, and never altogether persuasively, on the aspect of pleasure. Even the grim path of historical past — emphasised in an epilogue set 50 years later, through the rule of Islamists who restricted each form of music — can’t suppress the movie’s effervescence. A few of that comes from the music, a well-chosen sampling of English- and French-language radio hits. The forged can be dynamic and honest in a method that provides the drama a buoyant teen-movie spirit even because it takes a grave flip. It’s affecting, but additionally a bit glib.

Lovely, although. Guédiguian (assisted by his director of images, Pierre Milon) pays tribute to Malick Sidibé, a Malian photographer who documented the early years of independence, represented within the movie as a genial presence with a narrow-brimmed fedora, readily available to report the turmoil and the delight of the younger nation. He’s each a personality and an aesthetic inspiration for the film’s elegant, kinetic, color-filled frames, which conjure a misplaced however nonetheless vivid second of bliss.

Dancing the Twist in Bamako
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Working time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters.