A radio voice in a king's body. Balla Moussa Keita spent three decades playing Mali's elders, governors and monarchs, chiefly for Souleymane Cissé, and made them men rather than monuments; in Yeelen he is the film's warmth and its best company.
Fi1m perspective
When Niankoro walks into the Fulani court in Yeelen (1987), the wrong colour in every frame, Balla Moussa Keita looks him over the way a trader looks over a horse. His Rouma Boll is vain, funny and decent, a king who likes being king and is not ashamed of it, and who knows a useful stranger when he sees one. He demands a demonstration of the boy's powers with the air of a man expecting to be entertained. After an hour of fire-lit rites and dead-white noon, he is the first person in the film who seems to be enjoying himself.
The voice is the first thing you notice. Keita came to film from radio and the theatre, after years as a trader, and he spent part of the 1960s in China dubbing films into Bambara; he had spoken for a living long before anyone filmed him doing it. His kings and governors sound like men used to being listened to, and used to liking it. Cissé cast him in Den Muso (1975) and then in every feature after it: Baara (1978), Finyè (1982), where he is Governor Sangaré, Yeelen, and Waati (1995). Cheick Oumar Sissoko took him on for Finzan (1989), Guimba (1995), in which he plays Mambi, and La Genèse (1999), and Abdoulaye Ascofaré for Faraw (1997).
Authority was the part he was handed, over and over, and the interest is in what he did with it. Screen kings tend to come in two sizes, the tyrant and the sage, and Rouma Boll is neither. He is a small man with a large position who is not above being flattered, and the film is kinder and stranger for having him in it. We went into Yeelen braced for a hundred minutes of solemn ceremony and found that the one character we wanted to sit beside was the king, because Keita plays him as somebody who would rather be amused than obeyed. Kossa Mody Keita's indigo and white help; against the Bambara rust and brown, the Fulani court looks like the one place in the film where people dress for pleasure.
We should be honest about the size of the case. We have reviewed one of his films, and it is the one everybody reviews; Guimba, which by reputation is the other pillar, we have not sat through with a notebook, and the sources we have are uniformly admiring and thin on detail about the later, smaller parts. What the record does show is a man who taught at Mali's Institut national des arts, worked with the country's two leading directors across some thirty years, and was in nearly everything they made.
If you see only one of his films, make it Yeelen, and not only because it is the one that travelled. He is on screen for a fraction of it, and he is the part you will find yourself describing to somebody afterwards.
