Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Starring Youssouf Djaoro, Diouc Koma, Emil Abossolo M’Bo, Hadje Fatime Ngoua, Marius Yelolo, Djeneba Kone, Heling Li Club, IFI, Dublin, 92 min
YOU WAIT AN age for a film in which a swimming pool stands as a metaphor for national decline, then two arrive in as many weeks.
Following the reissue of Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End, Mahamat- Saleh Haroun's Chadian picture provides an even more slippery – somewhat too slippery perhaps – variation on this unlikely trope.
Winner of the Jury Prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival, A Screaming Manfocuses on Adam (Youssouf Djaoro), a former swimming champion, now the proud supervisor of a hotel pool in N'Djamena (the capital of Chad, as you didn't need to be told).
As the film grinds into leisurely action, Adam and Abdel (Diouc Koma), his adult son, listen to radio bulletins concerning the continuing civil war. The pressure is getting to the complex’s Chinese owners. In a move that seems disproportionately shocking to the protagonist, they sack the cook and move Adam from pool duties to a security job at the front entrance.
“The pool is my life,” he says disconsolately. He becomes further depressed upon learning that Abel has taken over his old job.
The moral fulcrum of the film concerns a fateful, quite appalling decision made by the hero under pressure from the local chief. From then on, Adam is, one fears, doomed to moral and spiritual decline.
Shooting in blank, unhurried style, Haroun, director of the acclaimed Abouna and Darratt, draws touchingly nuanced performances from actors whose features seem atrophied by the governing oppression. There is, however, a nagging problem with the central conceit. At times, the small drama of pool politics seems like an overly literal allegory for the greater confusion. At others, it’s hard to understand exactly what questions we are being asked.
These problems fade, however, in a gorgeous final scene that seems to gesture toward a less didactic, more poetic school of African cinema. A film well worth puzzling over.
