A death in the family is usually an emotionally draining ordeal… provided the deceased left the world with a fairly clean record. When Shula (Susan Chardy, in a debut performance) finds her Uncle Fred lying cold and dead on the side of a quiet road, her reaction—more aggravated and resentful than anything else—clues us in very early on to who Fred was in life and why Shula’s dry eyes are justified. Unfortunately, in Zambia, Bemba customs see anything less than loud wailing and sobbing at a death as suspicious, and Shula’s mother and aunts are certainly caught off-guard by her rigidity. In one memorable moment, one aunt whispers to Shula to at least try crying, as she’s proving to be an embarrassment to them. Perhaps it’s this bit of prodding that gives Shula a bit more incentive to be a bit more gracious in aiding her relatives in their time of grief, but knowing Fred’s countless sins, there can be no true capitulation. When one of her cousins is hospitalized during the funeral, and a startling video comes to light, Shula’s ability to contain her family’s darkest secrets becomes strained to a point of near rupture. But will anyone choose to see Fred for who he really was, or will forgiveness in death be the final indignity he will leave behind?
After breaking through in 2017 with her captivating debut I Am Not a Witch, Rungano Nyoni returns here with a film that positively quakes with anger and indignation as she stares down the incongruousness of her culture’s traditions when faced with sexual predators. Lasering in on the microcosms of Shula’s family causes Nyoni to eschew the same kind of compelling visuals that made her debut so successful, but her grasp on subtle surrealist turns remains strong, particularly in how she deals with the metaphor at the heart of her title. Chardy’s performance, meanwhile, is a perfect highwire act, balancing rage and vulnerability without losing her character’s strength of purpose. I was also taken with Elizabeth Chisela’s spirited performance as Shula’s hard-drinking cousin, and she is able to ably provide the key to reading the film’s tricky tonal variances, where levity ends up masking a greater sense of violence than originally realized.
If there are imperfections, they are mostly minor, and it becomes clear that there can never be tidy resolutions to the story being told here. And even if it is not several steps above I Am Not a Witch, what On Becoming a Guinea Fowl offers is a vital vision in our cinematic landscape of today, told by a filmmaker who does not fear taking the bold and uncompromising approaches needed to make her voice heard.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl had its North American premiere at TIFF in the Special Presentations programme on September 5, 2024.
The Lonely Film Critic 