MADAME BROUETTE

“Men make our lives impossible,” lament the village women. But enough to exterminate a life? In Niayaes Thiokeert, a Senegalese shantytown, the day after the crazy transvestite festival of “Tajaboom” (in which males dress as females, and vice-versa), gunshots ring out. One woman, a real one has evidently had enough. Her lover lays dead in his gaudy drag and face paint. The victim: Naaga the policeman, an ever-jovial go-between at the ghetto's shadowy border of law and the criminal underworld. He was half bully, half protector, all charm, and slicker and sweeter than molasses; in short, what Americans might call a “playa.” The suspect: Mati, a proud, divorced single mother who supported herself and a small daughter by selling food out of a push-cart hence her nickname, Madame Brouette, literally “Mrs. Wheelbarrow.” Mati encouraged the oft-used and abused wives of Niayes Thiokeert to stand up to their domineering husbands, only to fall hard herself for a charismatic rascal. A cop who doesn't so much fight crime as regulate it, Naaga first seemed a workable match for Mati (who isn't above a little illegality herself to finance her dream caf?). What went wrong? As in his “Tableau Ferraille” (22nd CIFF 1998), director Moussa Sene Absa employs a storytelling style that mixes an age-old chorus of tribal griots with modern sensationalist newscasters (and a native detective named Columbo) to recount a loopy saga of passion, ambition, chauvinism, corruption, gangsterism and betrayal, African-style, in the most colorful case of playa-hating since “Chicago.” (In French with English subtitles)