At the end of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s 2013 feature Grigris, the titular character and his girlfriend, Mimi, flee to the latter’s village to escape the vengeful wrath of an oil smuggler. When the couple is discovered by one of the smuggler’s henchmen, who intends to kill Grigris, the women of the village save his life. Bonded by their murderous deed, these women take an oath. “It’s our secret, till the grave,” an elder in the group declares as the rest of them place their hands, one by one, on top of a wooden stick.
It was the first time I had seen women play such a role in the Chadian director’s work. They were not merely supporting characters, but a collective, energizing force, governed by their own rules and connected by shared understanding. Haroun’s most recent film, the gorgeous and affecting Lingui, The Sacred Bonds, makes the significance of that moment even clearer; in some ways, the women in the two films are speaking to each other.
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Lingui, The Sacred Bonds
Premiering in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Lingui, The Sacred Bonds builds on those final moments in Grigris, plumbing the depths of the bonds between female characters — mothers and daughters, sisters, friends and even strangers — to reveal the lengths they will go to protect themselves and one another.
Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane) is a single mother living on the outskirts of N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, where she supports herself and her 15-year-old daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio), by making stoves with materials from salvaged tires. The film opens with a mesmerizing sequence of Amina at work: She cuts old tires open with a knife, pulls out the steel wires and fastens them onto a base made of metal rods. She is focused, and the beads of sweat that form on her forehead, taking a winding path from the edge of her tight cornrows to the base of her round nose, signal a long morning’s work. After making another stove, Amina changes from her workwear — a navy blue T-shirt and black shorts — into a burnt orange fabric wrapped around her body and over her head. It’s a transformation that marks the difference between her inner life and her outer presentation.
In Lingui, as in his other films, Haroun takes a quiet, meditative approach to storytelling. The city or landscape speaks for itself, calculated silences propel the narrative forward and facial expressions reveal motivations where language is insufficient. Joining forces with cinematographer Mathieu Giombini (A Season in France) and Marie-Hélène Dozo (A Screaming Man, Grigris), Haroun uses the opening moments of Lingui to immerse viewers in Amina’s routine. A golden hue highlights each frame, softening the ripples of the river where she meets her friend Bintou (Chanceline Allah-Odoum Guinlar), sharpening the sense of chaos as they cross the highway to the market and heightening the sun’s oppressive heat. The implicit juxtaposition between Amina, who spends hours hawking the stoves, and Bintou, who loves music and spent the previous night dancing, offers viewers an opportunity to see how different Chadian women exist, halting any assumptions we might be tempted to make about who they are.
When Amina returns home, she immediately senses something is off. Maria, whom she affectionately calls Mamita, is awfully quiet. Probing merely intensifies Maria’s withdrawal, prompting her to lash out at her mother. “Don’t call me Mamita,” Maria says sternly before retreating to her room.
Desperate for answers, Amina follows her daughter to school one day, where she discovers that Maria is pregnant and has been kicked out. The news fills Amina — who, we gather, got pregnant young and was subsequently rejected by her family — with unspeakable terror. She comes home and, in a fit of rage, beats her daughter, who declares that she wants an abortion.
The scenes between Amina and Maria are raw and honest, demonstrative of near perfect casting. Haroun avoids either over-emphasizing their conflict or leaning on saccharine moments to suggest intimacy. Instead, the pregnancy becomes an avenue through which mother and daughter can relate to one another, giving way to moments when Amina reveals more of herself to Maria.
Watching Lingui, I was frequently reminded of Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl.” The story, told from the perspective of an unnamed mother, takes the form of an instruction manual for how to behave in a society where women are not given the benefit of the doubt. Depending on the day, or more precisely one’s age, the advice can be read as tinged with cruelty or laced with fear. The contexts are different — Kincaid’s story is about growing up in Antigua and Haroun’s is a specifically Chadian experience — but the subtexts have similarities. Amina is also afraid here, but she harnesses that fear and allows it to open her up to an unfamiliar, but beautiful vulnerability. She initially refuses her daughter’s request for an abortion: They are Muslim, she says; it’s not allowed in Islam, she intones; and then finally, in a moment of acceptance, how will they do it?
How to get an abortion in a country where it is technically legal but impossible to access is the question that drives the rest of Lingui. Money, unsurprisingly, becomes Amina and Maria’s primary obstacle. When they finally find a doctor willing to perform the operation, he asks for 1 million CFAs. Determined not to let her daughter face the same fate she did — ostracized by family, shunned by a society that views single mothers as an aberration — Amina gets to work. She begins selling more stoves and even asks her neighbor, Brahim (Youssouf Djaoro), who proposes to her early in the film, if he would be willing to have sex with her in exchange for the money.
It’s women who end up saving Amina and Maria — from Amina’s younger sister Fanta (Briya Gomdigue), who unexpectedly resurfaces, to a midwife (Hadj Fatimé Ngoua) who offers to help. They come from various walks of life and, as Haroun smartly makes clear, span different socioeconomic classes, but they are linked by an unshakeable sense of community.
In press notes, Haroun offers a definition of lingui that not only animates how the women behave throughout his film but feels prescient for this moment: “It is a term that implies solidarity, mutual aid, and keeping each other afloat,” he said. “I can only exist because others exist, that is lingui.”
