Roots

The ordinary magic of Idrissa Ouedraogo

by Peter Keough

"A TRIBUTE TO IDRISSA OUEDRAOGO," At the Harvard Film Archive April 24 through 26.

Whether he's making a coming-of-age fable, a tragic love story, a film noir, or a buddies-on-the-road movie, the film genres of Burkina Faso's world-class filmmaker, Idrissa Ouedraogo, are not exotic, though the locales are. The limpid light, otherworldly terrain, and eldritch architecture of his West African homeland (formerly known as Upper Volta) suffuse his ordinary stories with magic, and the wry simplicity of his narrative and his characterizations propels them with deceptive efficiency. His clarity and transcendence of style are the kind of cinematic roots our own jaded film industry would be wise to return to.

You can see what I mean this weekend at the Harvard Film Archive, where five of his films will be shown and Ouedraogo himself will appear at each screening, including that of his most recent work, Kini and Adams (1997; Sunday at 8:30 p.m.). The film (which was not available for preview; neither was 1994's Afrique Mon Afrique, which screens Friday at 9 p.m.) seems a kind of Easy Rider, African style, in which the two title characters cross country in an old beater, seeking odd jobs to maintain their dream of independence.

Unlike Dennis Hopper's seminal hippie hit, Kini and Adams has no big score hidden in the gas tank. There is a dubious nest egg, though, in Samba Traoré (1993; Saturday at 9:30 p.m.). In a brusquely efficient, greasily shot night-time heist that unfolds in one of Ouedraogo's few urban settings, the title character gets the drop on gas-station robbers and hops on a bus back to his tiny native village with the take. The tone changes from angst to bucolic serenity as he enters the countryside, a sun-drenched fairyland of conical huts and shimmering savannah vistas where adoring lads frolicking by a languid waterhole greet him as a returning hero.

Not that they regard him as a kind of Robin Hood. Instead they and the rest of the villagers accept on faith that he's a local son who's made good in the big city, and that the wads of cash he flashes were earned working on a banana plantation. In short order he buys a herd of cattle for his father, sets up a tavern with his raffish boyhood friend, proposes to his old flame, and builds her the biggest house in town. Samba's conscience gets the best of him, however, and heavy drinking, bad dreams and bad faith gradually undermine his good fortune. In a series of events that occur with the inevitability of the cuts from night to day that set the film's rhythm, Samba is brought to a kind of justice -- or vice-versa.

One of the more disturbing images in the irrespressibly good-natured Samba Traoré is that of his enraged, torch-bearing father inflicting an especially draconian punishment. Family does matter in Ouedraogo's films, sometimes with Greek Tragic results. In Tila• (1990; Saturday at 7 p.m.), Saga returns home to his abandoned fiancée to discover that his father, has married her. The law, the tila• of the title, compels him to submit to the bantam patriarch. With the compliance of his sister and other women in the village, though, he subverts the law with adulterous trysts until his brother Kougri, torn by macho tradition and sibling love, ventures to intervene.

Incisive in its exploration of sexual and family politics, Tila• stages its spare convulsions in a vast African wasteland reminiscent of John Ford, with canny gestures that recast its passions on an intimate, sometimes absurdist scale. Comedy that is startling in its sleight-of-hand and a lofty but tender irony leaven the brute conflict between the human and natural, between the importunity of instinct and the oppression of social conformity. An aura of innocence also prevails, a primal, beneficent openness that comes not from na•veté but from wisdom.

That sensibility pervades Yaaba (1989; Friday at 7 p.m.), a fable of childhood initiation that evokes such masters of the form as Victor Erice in Spirit of the Beehive and Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. The yaaba, or "grandmother," of the title is an old village woman exiled as a suspected witch. A young boy first fears her, then finds her a source of understanding of their harsh but fascinating world of outlandish nature and repressive custom, and as her fate recedes, his spirit grows. Such is the nature, too, of Ouedraogo's films, in which the hugest space and minutest detail frame both the everyday and the revelatory.