Yeelen

Somewhere in Mali, a long time ago, a young man’s father wants him dead. Niankoro (Issiaka Kane) has the gift, the family sorcery of the Komo, and his father Soma (Niamanto Sanogo) regards that as theft. Souleymane Cissé, who wrote, produced and directed, follows the son away from home and the father after him, and takes 105 minutes over a chase most films would run in twenty. Nothing here is hurried. The title means light in Bambara, and before it is anything else the film is a record of what the sun does to red earth, white cloth and dark skin.

We think it is a fine film, and we recommend it with one warning: you will not understand everything. The Komo, its oaths, the carved post Soma’s servants carry, the milk Mah (Soumba Traore) pours into the river as she prays, none of it is explained. Cissé assumes an audience that already knows, and for nearly everyone reading this that audience is somebody else. We watched much of the film the way Niankoro watches the Fulani court, as a guest who has not been told the rules. Most of the time we found that a pleasure rather than a barrier.

Jean-Noël Ferragut and Jean-Michel Humeau shoot the daylight scenes head-on, in the middle of the day, so shadows go black and the ground burns almost white. At night they light the rituals with fire alone, and the faces come and go in it. Kossa Mody Keita, who designed both the costumes and the sets, keeps the Bambara in rust and brown and dresses the Fulani in indigo and white, so when Niankoro arrives among them he is the wrong colour in every frame, which is the point.

The performances are mostly quiet and mostly by people who had not acted before, and Cissé does not push them. Kane plays Niankoro as a serious boy with no idea of his own strength, and when the king demands a demonstration he looks as surprised by the result as anybody. Balla Moussa Keita’s Rouma Boll is the film’s warmth, a vain, funny, decent man who knows a useful stranger when he sees one. Aoua Sangare, as Attou, is given few lines and does a great deal with her eyes and her silences.

Sanogo’s Soma frightened us more than we expected to be frightened by a man walking. He is not grand. He is small and furious, stamping through the scrub behind his two servants, stopping to raise his arms and mutter his vows to the god he serves, and Cissé keeps cutting to the empty country around him as though it were listening. Nothing happens in these scenes. That is the horror of them: he does not tire and he does not stop, and every time we cut back to him he is closer. Sanogo also plays a second character later, and we will say only that the doubling is not a stunt.

The film has faults, and they are the faults of its method. The long middle among the Fulani drifts; a raid on the herds is staged with a handful of men and a lot of cutaways to dust. Magic is done as plainly as everything else, a man points and another man stops, and once or twice we smiled when we were meant to be awed. And the story’s sense of time is loose. We were never sure whether a journey had taken a night or a season.

As fantasy it has nothing to do with the kind that comes with effects. The gods are spoken to, never shown; the miracles are a gesture and a cut. Its nearest relatives are the folk tales it comes from, where a hero meets a king, a woman and an old man in that order and the land itself is a character. Cissé trusts that shape completely.

The second half heads out onto sand, towards something we will not describe, and ends on an image we have not shaken off. Watch it in one sitting, on the largest screen you have, with the curtains drawn. It is a film about daylight, and it needs darkness around it to work.