Touki Bouki

Studio: The Criterion Collection

Mar 25, 2021 Web Exclusive By Dustin Krcatovich

Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1973 film Touki Bouki is difficult to compare to anything else. A Senegalese Bonnie & Clyde, with more than a touch of Breathless? Sure, those influences are clear enough, lending the film a manic experimentalism distinct from the social realist narratives popular in West African films of the time. Yet Mambéty’s upbringing, the griot storytelling tradition, and the politics of everyday life in post-colonial Senegal flavor the movie immeasurably, and the combination of these elements puts Touki Bouki in a universe all its own.

Touki Bouki is the story of Anta and Mory, two young lovers in Colobane, a poor neighborhood in Senegal’s capital city of Dakar. Mory is a cattle herder who traverses town on a motorcycle with a zebu skull mounted to the front; Anta is a disaffected university student. Both feel alienated from the traditionalism of their surroundings, and long for a cosmopolitan life in Paris. One day, they take off on the aforementioned motorcycle, pull a couple of small-time heists to get enough money together for a boat ride to France, and set off for a new life… well, almost.

It’s not a shockingly original storyline, but Mambéty’s approach to it is. Touki Bouki can be difficult to follow upon one’s first viewing, moving as it does from violent abattoir scenes to slapstick to fantasy sequences; the audio is even more experimental, clashing naturalistic sound with odd-metered loops of Josephine Baker songs (a move which carries several layers of significance given Baker’s place as an American expat in France who faced great racism at home even at the height of her career) and other curious aural baubles. The juxtapositions are striking, sometimes shocking, and always carefully deployed.

Touki Bouki was hardly critically overlooked in its day. It won International Critics Award at 1973 Cannes Film Festival, a Special Jury Award at the 1973 Moscow Film Festival, and was ranked #52 in Empire magazine’s “The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema” list in 2010. Still, it’s exciting to have this excellent blu-ray package come courtesy of a leading authority on “important” films. The transfer, completed in 2008, is in 2K, but it looks lovely, and the bonus features include a 4K restoration of Mambéty’s Contras’ City.

While it’s perhaps a touch experimental for some, Touki Bouki certainly deserves its status as an important film, and should be seen by any adventurous film fan. One would be hard put to make a better package to experience it than this.

(www.criterion.com/films/28412-touki-bouki)

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