Television-Handed Ghostess

There are several moments in Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) where signs of modern life intrude on a tale apparently taking place outside time and space. For example, when the narrator and his second ghost wife have to strip naked to cross a very narrow bridge across a deep valley, they each leave behind a “costly wrist watch”. These are put on by a naked ghost couple heading in the other direction.

But the most striking instance comes towards the end of the novel, when the narrator encounters the Television-Handed Ghostess. This ghost has terrible sores all over her body, which can only be cured if an earthly person agrees to lick them every day for ten years. Our hero is reluctant.

“But when she told me to look at her palm and opened it nearly to touch my face, it was exactly as a television, I saw my town, mother, brother and all my playmates, then she was asking me frequently — ‘do you agree to be licking the sore with your tongue, tell me, now, yes or no?'”

In his foreword to this Grove Press edition Geoffrey Parrinder, a lecturer at University College Ibadan, notes that this Television-Handed Ghostess is “described by a man who has never seen television”. Elsewhere he cites conversations with Tutuola to back up his statements, but this comment is just thrown in. Other writers are happy to repeat it as fact, but I think it’s misleading.

It would be more accurate to say that Tutuola had not watched television. Nigeria was the first sub-Saharan country to introduce TV broadcasting, but that was not until 1959, long after the book was published. And up to that point Tutuola seems not to have travelled outside Africa. But he could easily have seen television in the cinema or in newspapers and magazines.

While American and British films filled the cinemas of Lagos in the 1940s and 1950s, it was rare for them to show the competing medium of television. I can find references to only one or two examples, such as Open Secret in 1948. However a search of the Pathé News and Movietone catalogues indicates that television was covered fairly often in contemporary newsreels.

It even turns up in this 1945 edition of forces newsreel The Gen, in which a happy family watches television in a section on prospects for servicemen after demobilisation. These newsreels were shown overseas, and Tutuola was a craftsman in the RAF in Nigeria from 1942-45. So perhaps…

I also think that the way Tutuola refers to the Television-Handed Ghostess assumes that his readers will know what he is talking about. It seems that the concept, if not the experience, was common enough in Nigeria in the early 1950s.

All of this is a little off my usual beat of cinema in African literature, and it is no surprise to find that the ghosts do not go to the movies in Tutuola’s novel, nor do the ‘deads’ in his debut, The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952). But this passage in the earlier book did catch my eye, from the part where the drinkard is staying with the Faithful Mother in the White Tree.

“The children of seven to eight years etc. of age were always dancing, tapping on the stage with melodious songs and they were also singing with warm tones with non-stop dance til morning. There we saw that all the lights in this hall were in technicolours and they were changing colours at five minutes intervals.”

Technicolour? That has to be from the cinema.

text © Ian Mundell 2015

See the latest Indian films

There is just one passing reference to the cinema in Cyprian Ekwensi’s 1963 novel Beautiful Feathers, but I find it rather evocative.

“Wilson and his men were gathered in his sitting-room. Wilson was talking, while the hawkers sold the evening kerosene outside and the buses were taking the cinema-goers to see the latest Indian films.”

This is Lagos, after independence, so as near contemporary as makes no odds. Were Indian films simply popular, or does he mean to suggest something else? Frivolity, perhaps, while Wilson Iyari and his friends are planning a demonstration in pursuit of African unity?

Ekwensi is hardly a subtle writer, and usually if he wants to make a point he does so plainly and repeatedly. So I’m inclined to think it is just local colour.

Beautiful Feathers is much simpler in its narrative than Jagua Nana (1961), the last Ekwensi novel I read. Wilson Iyari runs a pharmacy but also leads the Nigerian Movement for African and Malagasy Solidarity. These two activities take up all his time and his wife Yaniya feels neglected, seeking male company elsewhere. Hence the main theme: the great champion of African unity has a divided family, the respected leader has no authority at home.

The novel charts the ebb and flow of the Movement, and Wilson’s personal trials as Yaniya strays, leaves him and eventually returns chastened by the death of their eldest son, Lumumba (their other children are Jomo, a boy, and Pandhit, a girl…talk about dedication to the cause).

I always get the impression that Ekwensi wrote in a hurry, his plotting uneven and his prose sometimes careless or just plain bad. Yet he occasionally hits a higher, clearer tone, combining acute observation with a deftness of writing that makes me wonder what he might have achieved with more time or more discipline.

For example, here is his description of a girl hawker selling bread in the market.

“Her hands paddled her slim body, her neck danced to keep the vanishing balance of the loaded tray on her head, while her bare toes gripped the undulations of the earth. At the same time she was crying out musically to buyers the qualities of her wonderful bread.”

text © Ian Mundell 2015

Ben Okri in Brussels

It’s unusual to have an African writer in Brussels to help launch a Belgian film, but this was one reason for Ben Okri’s visit at the beginning of March. The Nigerian novelist and poet was also interviewed on stage before the screening, answering questions about his early life and its influence on his writing. The following day he gave a lecture on art’s role in society.

The film was N — The Madness of Reason, by Flemish director Peter Krüger, a mix of documentary and fiction whose starting point is French encyclopaedist Raymond Borremans. After fleeing Europe in 1929, Borremans travelled around Africa, first as a musician then running a mobile cinema.

He also started collecting information on every aspect of what was then French West Africa. Towards the end of his life he assembled an encyclopaedia on Côte d’Ivoire, where he had settled, but when he died in 1988 only the volumes up to the letter N had been published, hence the title.

Krüger’s film begins with Borremans’ death, then goes on to imagine the Frenchman’s spirit roaming restlessly around Africa, unable to find peace because his life’s work is unfinished. Along the way he observes the world he has left behind and encounters old friends, associates and people who follow occupations similar to his own.

In this way the film contrasts Africa’s past and present, and challenges the urge to order the world. “The aim of Borremans’ life was to objectify and systematise African reality, but as a spirit he is forced to enter a world which cannot be reduced to facts and figures,” Krüger says in the film’s press material. “The film presents a subjective experience of reality which is penetrated by a world of imagination, dreams, emotions, stories and poetry.”

Okri’s involvement came late in the process. Krüger had approached him at the beginning to collaborate in writing a text for the project but Okri was busy with a novel. Okri also explained during the post-screening Q&A that he thought the film would take much longer than the three years Krüger suggested. He was right.

Seven years on Krüger had finished shooting the film and had a rough edit, but he still needed a text. When he approached Okri again, the writer’s focus had moved from prose to poetry and the notion was a better fit. Having seen the rough cut, Okri worked independently on his text. He then handed it over to Krüger, who distributed it through the film.

Most of it is spoken in French, but other languages also feature, and some of Okri’s text has been turned into lyrics to be sung. Largely, however, the words represent Borremans’ inner thoughts, voiced by Michael Lonsdale, and a dialogue between Borremans and an African woman (Wendyam Sawadogo) who can perceive his spirit. In some instances, Krüger said, he altered the editing slightly to accommodate the text, but it seems that Okri’s words were used rather like a musical score. This accords with Okri’s approach to the text.

“I wrote it like poetry,” he says in an interview recorded when the film screened at last year’s Ghent Film Festival. “I added oblique lines. I introduced words that pulled at the image, that sometimes subverted the screen, that sometimes opened a new door into the image and into the world of the characters. It was just little additions, just the way Miles Davis does his trumpet interventions.”

He also spoke about how he felt the text should complement the images. “The words must do things that images cannot do, which is imaginative suggestion, hinting at other realms, philosophical disturbances, ripples on the surface of the screen. A sneak punch underneath the mind of the viewer.”

This works to some extent if you are a French speaker, and the words enter your mind on the same level as the images. But reading the subtitles — which you have to do in any case when the language changes — puts the words at a disadvantage. Both Krüger and Okri spoke of an interest in the oral tradition in African art, which makes all the writing on the screen somewhat counterproductive. Unfortunately (but typically for a ‘Flemish’ film in Belgium) there appear to be no plans to screen N — The Madness of Reason in French-speaking parts of the country, nor was this Brussels avant-première at Bozar followed by a general release in the city.

The way of working and the translation into French makes it rather hard to assess Okri’s contribution, although in addition to providing the text it seems clear that he was an inspiration for Krüger’s appreciation of Africa. For example, there is one shot of a misty road at night that strongly recalls scenes from Okri’s The Famished Road.

Okri is complementary about the film, of course, but it is interesting that he situated his comments last year in the wider context of films about Africa, both by Europeans and by Africans. “There’s a way that Africa tends to be filmed that I’m not very fond of, which is to say it tends to be filmed too externally,” he said. “It’s too much of an outward gaze, too much of looking for sensational elements. But what Peter had done is he’d filmed Africa with warmth and with dimension, with transcendence. He’d looked at ruins and decay and sadness, but he’d also looked at fertility and richness and dance and celebration. He conveyed the richness. I like the textuality of the film, I like the layers of it.”

During the March Q&A he said that he hopes to publish his text, either as part of a future poetry collection or as a stand-alone publication. The press kit gives a 15-line taster, beginning:

The road is singing about the voices of the feet
The crooket feet of history.

We have suffered
And our songs will return our missing moments.
What does it mean to return?

And yes, ‘crooket’ rather than ‘crooked’.  You can get an idea of the way Okri’s text is used in the film through this excerpt. Meanwhile, his lecture — entitled Can Art Save the World? — can be seen here.

text © Ian Mundell 2015

If he had liked her at the Odeon…

There have been so few mentions of the cinema in my recent reading of African fiction that I’m inclined to make something of the faint traces in Hurray for Somo and Other Stories, a 1982 collection by Ugandan author Ejiet Komolo.

There is a colourful crowd in front of the Odeon Cinema waiting for the seven o’clock show. A handsome young man, slight of build and stature, takes one look around and decides to go up into the bar up-stairs. He has seen this film before.

In Ejiet’s tales of amorous adventure, the cinema is mainly of interest as a place to meet girls. Polo, the hero of Kampala…! knows that the barmaids in the Odeon can be his for the asking, but tonight his sights are set higher. He bumps into a promising girl at the bottom of the stairs, and they go off to dinner at the Kampala International Hotel. Now he congratulates himself on avoiding the cinema’s deceptions.

She was even more beautiful than the neon lights at the Odeon had made her out. As a rule Polo distrusted these lights where faithful judgement of a woman’s beauty was concerned.

If he had liked her at the Odeon, now he was ready to worship her.

As in so many of these stories, the bulk of the narrative is taken up with the entanglement of man and girl, before ending in a violent twist. The same is true of The Ringed Moon, in which Irumba has fallen for Krishna, an Indian girl. Realising that their cross-cultural relationship is doomed, they agree to go out one last time.

“There is a beautiful film on, called Vishful Thinking. I do vant you to see it.”

This is Ejiet doing an Indian accent, something he attempts with other accents in other stories, only to fall over himself explaining what the character means. The film is not identifiable, unlike the books he has his characters read, for instance Path of Thunder by Christopher Okigbo. Anyway, Irumba and Krishna are too early for the film and go for a walk instead, which is when violent retribution catches up with them.

Finally, there is a reference to the ubiquity of Westerns. In Not for Love, the narrator rescues a girl from being raped, but doesn’t like the threats her assailants throw at him.

I was hardly in the mood for loudmouthed intercourse drawn straight from cheap cowboy films.

Ejiet is not a great stylist, and the sensationalist bent of the stories undercuts some interesting character portraits. But I like the narrative device he uses in Mistaken Identity of a man who is often told detailed and intimate stories because his face looks familiar to so many people.

This collection appears to be Ejiet’s main work in English. In 2005 it was expanded slightly to become Aida, Hurray for Somo and Other Stories, and published under the name Austin Ejiet. He spent much of his career as a university professor, teaching English literature and, for a time, creative writing. Obituaries published in 2010 also say he wrote satirical newspaper columns, in English, and three children’s books in Ateso, his mother tongue.

text © Ian Mundell 2015

Clark, Speed and the Ozidi saga

I hadn’t heard of Frank Speed until I started investigating an aside in a 1966 essay on Nigerian drama by John Pepper Clark. And now I have heard of this ethnological film maker — who sounds like an obscure English Jean Rouch — I wonder why he isn’t better known.

My starting point was Clark’s comment about filming a performance of the Ozidi saga, which takes place over seven days in a remote part of the Niger delta. Clark spent 1963-64 researching the saga, work which informed his 1966 verse drama Ozidi. In the essay he also mentions plans to publish a transcript of the whole saga, in Ijaw and English, a project that was eventually realised in 1977.

Clark doesn’t say much more about the film in the essay. It was shot in Orua, and ‘possession’ among the performers (a term he uses, but disparages) caused constant delays in shooting. He ends by expressing the hope that the film will be seen outside Ijaw.

So is this an ethnological document, a fiction built from the performance or something else? If it is somehow authored by Clark, the film would be a relatively early example of creative Nigerian cinema.

Searching for further traces of the film led me to Frank Speed, who is credited as Clark’s collaborator in the project. Speed worked in Nigeria from the 1950s onwards, making medical documentaries and films recording rituals, dances and other performances. Although highly regarded, little detailed information is available about his life and work.

Scholars working with Clark’s texts of the Ozidi saga also reference the film. Isidore Okpewho, a professor at the State University of New York Binghampton who specialises in oral literature, often mentions it in passing but seems not to think it particularly significant. Neither Speed nor the film appear in the index of Blood on the Tides, his latest book on the saga.

Richard Dean Taylor, professor of English and comparative literature at Bayreuth University in Germany, is more interested. In his 1982 inaugural lecture he examines the various versions of the Ozidi saga overseen by Clark and the transition from oral to written literature. He concludes that the film is a valuable record of an authentic presentation.

“JP Clark made self-conscious decisions when arranging the scenario and commentary. However, the film does demonstrate the meaning the saga has for its natural audience,” he says. This is in contrast to the performance recorded, transcribed and eventually published by Clark, which took place in Ibadan before an invited audience of urban Ijaw speakers, Nigerians from other communities and ex-pats.

More importantly, however, the text of the lecture on Taylor’s website includes a link (live in December 2014) which allows the Ozidi film to be seen in its entirety. Entitled Tides of the Delta, the 30-minute film is dated 1969, and attributed equally to Clark and Speed.

The film begins with the striking image of an oil palm stump bobbing eerily in the river. “That strange figure reeling there in the tide is no fetish to some god of the sea demanding sacrifice. Nor is it a stray, baffled monster left over by the wash of time. Tide, like time, carries all kinds, with countless unknown drifts…”

This is a more poetic commentary than might be expected from an academic ethnographic film or a commissioned travel short. And Clark’s delivery (assuming he is the narrator) is precise and poised.

He goes on to describe the region and the Ijaw, their trades and occupations. Then a more knowing tone appears, a reminder that Clark is talking about his own people. “One local export of the Ijaw, well-known behind doors and under desks all over the west coast of Africa, is the so-called illicit gin they distil from the wine of the raffia or […] palm in simple home-made apparatus, well away from the baleful eye of the law and it’s long, itching palm.”

He turns next to the river and its traffic, much of which passes the Ijaw by. And then a political note enters, for the first time disconnected from the images on screen. “Merchant adventurers from overseas, in towering seismic rigs and floating suburbias, drain the Delta dry of oil, now overflowing the place to enrich others outside.” This is followed by a comment on the way the region has been neglected by governments, both before and after independence.

This introduction lasts seven minutes, before the film finally turns to the Ozidi “festival”. Images of the performance and the audience follow, with Clark’s narration guiding the viewer through the story as it unfolds over a week, beginning in one village and concluding in another.

The lead performer is by turns a storyteller, taking on multiple roles, and the actor who plays the hero Ozidi. He is supported by a troupe of actors who act out the story.  This concerns a young warrior who sets out to avenge his father’s death, helped by his grandmother, who is a powerful witch. After defeating his father’s killers, there are other battles with people who try to trap Ozidi or challenge his supremacy. These opponents become increasingly fantastic, including an incestuous cannibal mother and son, and the Smallpox King who finally defeats Ozidi. The narrative is accompanied by singing, dancing and a series of rituals.

Constrained to remain in the crowd, Speed’s images are sometimes distant, but capture the drama and mobility of the performance, as well as the reactions and interactions of the crowd. They dovetail neatly with Clark’s commentary, and occasionally achieve a more formal beauty in their framing.

I wouldn’t want to claim too much for the film. It is only 30 minutes long and it was clearly shot during a flying visit rather than the result of a long immersion in the community. Yet it seems to me to occupy an interesting place between ethnography and a more personal essay film.

As far as the Ozidi festival is concerned, Clark appears to be a very close outsider, a guide and interpreter rather than an observer from a completely different culture. And in the introduction, which concerns the Ijaw of the Delta more broadly, he is commenting on a place and a people he knows well and might even be called his own.

When he talks of young boys swimming out to meet boats on the river (not something that appears on screen), is he thinking of himself or childhood friends? The tone of the commentary suggests he might be.

Having quickly run through the available evidence about the film, there are, of course, some loose ends. While most reliable sources talk of just one Ozidi film, there are inconsistencies that could point to others. Some sources date the film to the mid-1970s, which is likely to reflect its availability in the UK and USA. Others call it The Ozidi of Atazi, but there is little evidence to suggest this is a different film (Atazi, according to the film, was the first storyteller, two or three generations before the performance shown).

Some sources also credit Peggy Harper as co-director, which is not backed up by the present version. She was a choreographer who worked with Speed in the 1970s on a series of films dealing with Nigerian dances and masquerades. Initially I thought this was a simple error, but then I found a recent interview with Speed’s colleague Doig Simmonds, in which he describes the filming in some detail. He and Harper accompanied Speed and Clark, the party sleeping on a launch on the river during the shoot. His comments come between 7.14 and 10.40 in this recording by Jeremy Weate, who has also posted an image of Harper on location.

Finding this copy of Tides of the Delta answered my questions about the film mentioned in Clark’s essay, but it has also piqued my interest in Speed. When he died in 2006, The Guardian‘s obituary suggested that he remains a significant ethnographic filmmaker, but his legacy seems to be limited to academia. The Royal Anthropological Institute in London rents out some of his films to educational institutions and there are occasional screenings in academic settings, but there is nothing like the programme of DVD releases devoted to other ethnographic filmmakers. I would be fascinated to see more of his work.

text © Ian Mundell 2015

Sembène meets Pagnol

I thought I had picked up all the cinema references in Ousmane Sembène’s first novel, Le Docker noir (1956), until I glanced through an English translation. Then I read this:

How could I have missed such a clear cinematic simile? Well, the original French text is not nearly so explicit. Instead of saying the city looked like a scene from a Marcel Pagnol film, Sembène is more allusive.

The English translator, Ros Schwartz, has joined the dots for us, informing readers that Marius and Olive (or rather Ollivier) are characters in Pagnol’s  Marseille trilogy. This begins with Marius, a 1931 film written by Pagnol and directed by Alexander Korda. Before that, however, Marius was a stage play, published in book form at around the time the film came out.

Sembène was writing in the 1950s, having lived for several years in Marseille. Would he know Marius and the rest of Pagnol’s Marseille trilogy from the cinema, the stage or the library? Or is he adopting a common shorthand for local colour? The substitution of Olive for Ollivier might just be a typo, but to call them companions when they are father and son — César and Marius Ollivier — suggests Sembène may not have known the work that well.

Yet the possibility of a connection is fascinating. Pagnol is not usually cited as an influence on Sembène, but it’s a notion that might bear further scrutiny.

text © Ian Mundell 2014

Not a word to Ma

People rarely go to the cinema in Ousmane Sembène’s first novel, Le Docker noir (1956), but they talk about it all the time. They talk about wanting to go, about not going, and about using a trip to the movies as an excuse for doing something else.

The story unfolds in contemporary France, mainly in Marseille, among the Africans who work as casual labour in the docks. The cinema is ubiquitous popular entertainment, but considered expensive. “I’m as poor as Job,” says Diaw Falla, the docker of the title. “If I go to the cinema, tomorrow I’ll be eating on credit.”

But it’s a different story when he later offers to buy sweets for a friend’s child. “I don’t want any,” the boy says, “but slip me the cash to go to the movies…and not a word to Ma, it’s just between us. I’ll fill her in once the money is spent.”

Even then, before he became a film director himself, Sembène appreciated the popular appeal of the cinema.

text © Ian Mundell 2014

Golder’s offer

The second set of references to the cinema in Wole Soyinka’s 1965 novel The Interpreters is connected to a particular character, Joe Golder, an American lecturer at the university who claims to be a quarter black and wants desperately to embrace his distant African heritage. “For God’s sake blacken me,” he says to Kola, who is using him as a model for a painting of the gods. “Make me the blackest black blackness in your pantheon.”

Golder also has a predilection for male black students and has developed a whole range of strategies to test their openness to his advances.

This in turn would lead to a conversation about the handsomeness of the film’s hero, and the attractiveness of men in general. Yet the tactic was rarely successful, leaving Golder “chagrined always to discover that the craving for beauty or ‘handsomeness’ was only one more student aesthetic malformation”.

Several pages earlier, Golder has tried is charm on the young journalist Sagoe, who has memories of his own about cinema predators.

While Soyinka’s feelings about American cinema are not clear in all this, there can be little doubt that he didn’t have much time for the Americans to be found in cinemas.

text © Ian Mundell 2013

Authentic cobra maidens

There are two cinema references in Wole Soyinka’s 1965 novel The Interpreters, different enough to warrant separate entries. The first takes place in a bar, where the cast of young Nigerian men have gathered to contemplate their troubles. At a certain point, the music changes. “The drumming had turned brisk for the floor-show,” Soyinka explains, “it was the familiar beat that announced the guttural entry of the witchdoctor in foreign films on Africa.”

Which makes me wonder if, alongside all the westerns and crime films that made the rounds in African cinemas of the period, the more ‘exotic’ adventure yarns also travelled, and what impression they made on audiences. An answer is suggested later in the same scene, when the man performing the floor show takes a fall.

So were the Tarzan films shown widely in Africa? Were they seen and did their counterfeit images seep into the local culture? Or is this an international component of Soyinka’s rich narrative voice?

text © Ian Mundell 2013

Belgian cinema in May and June

The Belgian film drought continues. Stretching a point you could say that four local films had a theatrical release during May and June, with nothing more scheduled until September. There are some promising films waiting in the wings, but for the moment the industry appears to be on its uppers.

The best of the four new releases is A Pelada, a low-budget, sweet-natured sex comedy made in Brazil by Belgian director Damien Chemin. It tells the story of Caio, a poolman who spins dizzying tales of sexual conquest to his friends but is basically too lazy or too timid to do anything of the sort. When Sandra, his wife of three years, suggests their flagging relationship needs spicing up, he nearly dies of shock. But she is serious, partly because she loves Caio, partly because a fleeting kiss from another woman has aroused her curiosity. And so begins a series of misunderstandings and misadventures as Caio and Sandra try to get their act together, as we know they must.

While it’s not unusual for Belgian directors to shoot far from home, this tends to be at the art-house end of the market or because there is some diaspora connection. Think Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth, Gust Van den Berghe and latterly Chantal Akerman in the first category, Diego Martinez-Vignatti and Kadir Balci in the second. Marion Hänsel is a notable exception, a globe-trotter working in the mainstream.

Damien Chemin trained as a cinematographer in Brussels, going on to make a series of fiction shorts and documentaries. But then he fell in love with Brazil and found work there making adverts and documentaries for public television. A Pelada was conceived as a modest TV movie for a regional broadcaster, intended to give the people of Aracaju in the north-east a chance to see their own city in fiction. But Chemin was also able to interest his old producer Tarantula Belgique in the project, which in turn brought in funds from Belgium’s French community, a Belgian broadcaster and the tax shelter. Financially, this is a majority Belgian co-production.

Even so, the budget is low and it shows, with both sound and image experiencing some dodgy moments. But it is well written and the two leads — Bruno Pêgo and Kika Farias — are beautifully cast. It’s a joy to watch them wrestling with their contrasting emotions, their discomfort focused on worries so slight that it prompts sympathy rather than the teeth grinding inherent in most comedies of embarrassment.

A Pelada can also be considered an addition to the slight corpus of Belgian LGBT cinema, thanks to its bi-curious storyline and a range of gay and lesbian characters that goes beyond the usual stereotypes. While not exactly a queer film, it is pleasingly open-minded.

The gender roles are much more traditional in Je suis supporter de Standard, a football-themed rom-com that marks the directing debut of minor actor Riton Liebman. He plays Milou, a fanatical supporter of Standard Liège football club who has to hide his obsession when he falls for Martine (Léa Drucker), a radio producer who detests the beautiful game. At first he succeeds, but when she finds out that he is seeing eleven men behind her back, he has to kick his addiction.

This would appear to be fertile ground for something in the Judd Apatow line: a first act of gross bad behaviour morphs into a second of tension between the sexes, before resolving into a romantic conclusion. The problem is that Milou is not a loveable Apatow man-child, but a selfish, superior and sometimes vicious creep. It’s hard to like him, hard to believe that Martine likes him, and impossible to care what happens to him.

A further problem with the film is that it also wants to be a Jewish comedy, pitting Milou against his successful brother, long-suffering mother and an uncle who is trying to tempt him back into the faith. This theme is not developed very far, but it is tempting to imagine how the film might have turned out as a full-on Brussels Jewish comedy with some romance and football thrown in, rather than a low-rent Walloon Fever Pitch. It is also tempting to think how Philippe Blasband or Micha Wald might have shot it, but now we’re straying too far into fantasy football.

Sous le figuier might be squeezed into the Belgian family by virtue of director Anne-Marie Étienne, who was born here but has made her career in France with film such as Tôt ou tard (1999) and Si c’était lui… (2007). And while this is a majority French co-production, mainly shot in Luxembourg, there are Belgian connections in the plot and the cast.

It begins in Brussels, where Nathalie, Christophe and Joëlle (Anne Consigny, Jonathan Zaccaï, and Marie Kremer) are experiencing crises at work and in their relationships. While all have children, none of them really has a family. Then there is Nathalie’s friend Selma (Gisèle Casadesus), who is 95 years old and living alone, earning pin money by telling fortunes. Various connections and coincidences bring them together at a large house in the country, where they plan to spend the summer along with Christophe’s three small daughters. It is also where Selma plans to die, gently and happily. As she approaches the end, the others start to see clearly what they need in their own lives.

Superficially light and heart-warming, this sentimental drama draws on some deep, dark anxieties about contemporary life, from the erosion of family relationships to the fear of dying alone. Just as escaping to the country gives the characters distance, so it allows the viewer to think about these things without getting too depressed. This is also the film’s main weakness, since it produces a fantasy of family life and beautiful death that seems very distant from reality.

Finally, what could be more Belgian than Piet Piraat en het Zeemonster, the fourth in a live action franchise from children’s entertainment factory Studio 100. Helped along by TV programmes, theme parks and a whole heap of merchandising, the films routinely figure in the lists of the best attended local films of the year.

text © Ian Mundell 2013