Lingui, The Sacred Bonds review: a beautifully photographed, forceful feminist drama
Dir: Mahamet-Saleh Haroun; Cast: Achouackh Abakar, Rihane Khalil Alio, cert TBC, 87 mins
There are no cinemas in Chad – a state of affairs which makes the prolific career of the filmmaker Mahamet-Saleh Haroun something of a miracle. In his own country, his pictures are screened on an underground basis, at film clubs, and shared among those in the know.
The young actress in Haroun’s new feature had no idea that he had previously directed her elder sister in the wonderful Abouna (2002) – my introduction to his work – which screened in Cannes to great acclaim that year. A staple on the international festival circuit, he’s made six films since, including the disability drama Grisgris (2013) and the Jury Prize-winning A Screaming Man (2010), about a hotel pool attendant who packs his son off to war.
Lingui, the Sacred Bonds, a very plausible contender for this year’s Palme d’Or, is named after the Chadian word for a bond or connection, applying in this case to the womenfolk of N’Djamena generally, and one mother-daughter relationship in particular. The 30-ish Amina (Achouackh Abakar) is bringing up her 15-year-old daughter Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio) by herself, and becomes faced with a crisis which could see them publicly ostracised. Maria is secretly pregnant, from a father who’s nowhere to be seen. She’s desperate to abort the baby, a recourse which is legally unavailable and of which her mother, at first, is unwilling to approve.
Doctors, who risk five years in prison if they perform the operation, charge daunting fees. On Maria’s behalf, Amina visits a local woman who might be a backstreet option, roughly N’Djamena’s answer to Vera Drake. But her trepidation about the odds of something going wrong is always present in Abakar’s impressively wary performance, while the camera pans up to dusty shelves of vials and instruments that inspire shudders.
The men in this situation are obstacles and worse. The imam, keeping tabs on their attendance at prayer, smugly insists “we’re all brothers in Islam”, but like the other keepers of the patriarchal order, has no idea that female circumcisions are being faked, by women practitioners, under his very nose. Amina’s elderly neighbour has designs on marriage mainly as a means to prey on her daughter, according to Haroun a worryingly common domestic setup.
Lingui has subtler storytelling than first meets the eye, but the eye, in any case, is busy lapping up its rich sensory evocation of this working-class milieu. The intense quality of the sunlight striking ochre suburban walls, and the scenes of retreat into darkened bedrooms, give it heady contrast as a visual experience. And Haroun is a wizard with sound, too, plunging us into a zone of punishing male noise, all motorbikes and mayhem, when Maria flees to the city centre.
Her mother earns a living by stripping the cords out of salvaged car tyres and using them to make “kanoun” (a kind of wire stove). These solitary scenes of watching her at work are mesmerising. But it’s the silent allegiances of sisterhood, a near-underground network operating to safeguard women’s rights, which exercise Haroun’s imagination throughout this excellent piece. Much like the culture of cinemagoing, feminism may not officially exist in his country, but that’s not to say you can’t locate it, in whispered exchanges, conspiratorial smiles, or any mother’s conscience.
Screening at the Cannes Film Festival. A UK release has yet to be announced.
