What’s the right way to grieve when the act won’t forgive a crime? In Rungano Nyoni’s entrancing, moody family drama “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” a young woman (Susan Chardy) returns home to navigate rituals of mourning for a deceased uncle — formalities that clash with the reality of the monster he was.
Nyoni’s sophomore feature, which garnered her a directing prize at Cannes, follows her justly acclaimed 2017 debut “I Am Not a Witch.” That semi-fanciful film was a deadpan spin on the ingrained misogyny that conveniently tags a steely, orphaned 9-year-old village girl as a sorceress. The British Zambian writer-director’s new story, however, is more psychologically concentrated on individual pain and cultural power, specifically the damage that sin and silence wreak in matriarchal societies that internalize patriarchy. You don’t need to be a middle-class Zambian or conversant in African tribal funerary customs to be caught up in this finely turned exploration of sexual abuse’s long reach.
The allusive, charged opening sequence alone would qualify as a devastating short film on the subject. Driving home from a costume soirée, Shula (Chardy) encounters a dead body in the road. We never see the man fully, but when she pulls off her futuristic party mask, the blank glare from her glittered eyes betrays cold recognition and a briefly inserted shot of her girlhood self (Blessings Bhamjee) wearing the evening’s same billowy black party outfit evokes a chilling certainty. On the phone, Shula’s dad (Henry B.J. Phiri) reacts as if it’s some trick: “Uncle Fred can’t die — just sprinkle some water on him.”
What does get revived is Shula’s buried trauma, which in childhood led her to a fascination with the title bird’s cautionary cry, and in the film’s present day manifests itself through Chardy’s mesmerizing, tense impassivity. (Also, visually, in one of Nyoni’s more sublimely dreamlike touches, as a house prone to flooding.) With relatives pouring in, increasing the pressure to participate in a days-long funeral where forceful aunties police everyone’s bereavement — even, cruelly, the young widow (Norah Mwansa) they all see as a gold digger — Shula searches for accountability from a gathering where family unity was always forged by ignoring open secrets.
It nevertheless strengthens Shula’s bond with her generation’s other victims, a tart-humored cousin (a wonderful Elizabeth Chisela) prone to alcohol binges, and a sweet-faced college student (Esther Singini) who worrisomely falls into unconsciousness. In another scene, it fosters a shared revolt with the older women, who briefly allow their own sublimated pain to emerge. Confronting her father at his job about what’s going unsaid regarding Uncle Fred, however, goes nowhere. “Do we question the corpse?” is his aggravated response.
That Nyoni films this scene from a distance — the film’s only prominent living male character doesn’t rate a close-up — says something. Justice, the movie argues, is in the hands of the women, should they recognize the obvious power they wield in their community. In its atmosphere of gnawing discomfort with imposed secrecy about bad men, “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” is a uniquely dimensional work of character and temporality. Nyoni’s brilliance is in portraying the gap between public and private, past and present, as spaces where submerged feelings awkwardly co-exist, leaving nobody able to feel truly whole.
In Nyoni’s terrific compositions, special mention must be made of David Gallego’s crisply evocative cinematography: interiors and exteriors of moonlit, shadowy depth that suggest an eternal night made palatable by pockets of haunting light. Even the day scenes feel tinged by darkness — especially when Shula visits her dead uncle’s home to find a neglected hovel of forgotten children likely to be abandoned by her judgmental aunties. But it also sows the seeds for this hypnotic movie’s striking final image, a moment of sunlight, the sound of birds and human fury. Silence and powerlessness can be tolerated for only so long.
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