The Young Girl

In the Splinters, the Light

The cinema of the recently deceased Malian filmmaker, Souleymane Cissé, is best known for his 1980s trilogy: Baara (1980), Finyè (1982), and Yeelen (1987). It was in this masterpiece, in particular, that Cissé left his mark on the history of film forms with a style pregnant with mythical imagination and allegorical evocation. At first glance, Den Muso (The Young Girl, 1975), his feature film debut, could not be further from this future tone: it is a harsh, biting, brutal film. Rooted in the present, Cissé's gaze X-rays the divisions of Malian society—especially the chasm between the places of men and women—to the rhythm of a severe camera and an abrasive editing style that leaves splinters all over the film's fabric.

At the centre of the narrative is the trajectory of the girl Ténin. Raised in a wealthy and traditional family, she moves as best she can between the confinement of the aristocratic home and brief escapes to go to the cinema or the city’s bars with her sister. A childhood affliction marks her existence: as a result of meningitis, Ténin is mute. In parallel, Sékou, an energetic young man, rises up against the poor working conditions in a bicycle factory and decides to resign. His boss is none other than the protagonist's father.

On the margins, Cissé's camera autopsies the guts of a fractured society: between those who are condemned to incessant work—welding, the communal beating of a slab—and those who profit from it. But the most important division here is that between men and women. While the former slide swiftly through the city on their motorcycles, the latter are confined to the house or its surroundings. If they have enough money and are young, they can still move in the gaps, in secret, to seek some form of pleasure while trying to escape the unrestricted harassment of the young men. In jolts, the editing takes us from one sequence to another, alternating between observation and narrative immersion, between a large-scale fresco and a portrait, not without first making us experience the giddiness of accidents. Den Muso is a film riddled with holes.

When Sékou and Ténin meet, at first there is still a sweet remnant of a youthful love's promise. He is attractive, lively, and class-conscious. She has no words to offer, but the tenderness of her gaze says everything. Soon, however, the prevailing aridity will gnaw at the film from the inside. On the banks of a river, Ténin is raped by Sékou, and the vile silence of the soundtrack places us in the desert. Closer to the initial films of Ousmane Sembène—especially Mandabi (1968) and Xala (1975)—than to those Cissé himself would go on to make in the following decade, the camera in Den Muso dangerously approaches the viscera of things, its cut is dry and merciless, and the noises of the city ceaselessly infiltrate everything.

Pregnant, Ténin still tries to bet on love, but Sékou is already hunting for his next victim and refuses to acknowledge the child. Now she will have to contend with her father's fury, the annihilation of her desires, and the impossibility of her life. In this film of shining edges and dead ends as far as the eye can see, any possibility of escape struggles to breathe. The young people go to the cinema in search of dreams, but what they see on screen is the documentary-style explosion of a religious temple. Even the priests, who promise to illuminate Sékou's destiny with the help of spirits, turn out to be petty thieves. Even Ténin's revenge, when she sets fire to the hideout where Sékou takes women, is quelled by the firefighters' hose. Ténin is not "a Black girl from..." (or at least not in the sense of Sembène's film), but a relentless destiny like that of the protagonist of La noire de... (1966) is what inevitably awaits her.

There is a recurrent reading of Ténin as a great allegory for a silenced, reviled, and helpless Africa. But her character is so singular, so brimming with inner life, that the film refuses to turn her into a repository of pain. The girl thumbs through a photo album and the editing grants her a glimpse of another story: in a wedding dress, with an impeccable hairstyle, she daydreams of an impossible marriage. In a sunny, dazzling sequence, enlivened by music and imbued with a childlike joy, she runs through the house chasing her sister, to attack her with water from a garden hose. In these cracks through which a bit of light enters, the future of Cissé's cinema infiltrates, still clandestine.