Shula is driving home from a fancy dress party one night when she encounters an unusual sight in the middle of a country road: her Uncle Fred’s dead body.
But Shula, portrayed by Susan Chardy, does not behave in a way that we would expect. She doesn’t cry out in horror or appear the least bit upset or shocked by the sight. Instead, we sit there with her in silence, her in sunglasses and a silver helmeted mask adorned with sparkling rhinestones. Shula looks straight out of a music video as she stares off into the distance. This, we realize quickly, is going to be a thing. At the very least, it’s an inconvenience, ripping her out of her independent life and back into the throes of her traditional family, their patriarchal ways and all their crippling secrets.
This is the opening scene of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, Rungano Nyoni’s darkly comedic, stylish and hauntingly bizarre portrait of a Zambian family funeral. It is perhaps the first great film of this year. It premiered last year at the Cannes Film Festival and has already had a run in the UK.
Photo: AP
And it’s a post-Oscars treat to have something this great in the cinemas to shake audiences out of their end-of-the-road awards contender boredom. What better way to do it than with something so different, so vibrant and so unforgettable as On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, only the second feature from the self-taught filmmaker.
Nyoni centers this story around a dayslong funeral for this predominately Bemba family. Shula is in the middle of the generations involved, a reluctant but obedient participant in the rituals of the elders. The women organize all the things, make all the food, and then serve all the men who are sitting around doing nothing. Eventually, they’ll all gather for a climactic, distressing scene in which they divide up Fred’s assets and place blame for his death. It is, like everything else, deeply unfair and misogynistic, coming down to whomever shouts loudest.
The elder women cry and wail and are cruel to Uncle Fred’s widow for not taking care of him. But there is an open secret that’s bubbling up to the surface now that Fred is dead: He was a predator and a pedophile whose abuse of the young women in his family stretches back decades. This is, most of the elders agree, something that should just be forgotten and buried along with Fred.
Photo: AP
“Do you want me to dig up the corpse and ask it what happened?” Shula’s dad asks when she confronts him with the truth.
This is a society that remains bound to protecting the reputation and memory of a man whose actions continue to affect the women he violated: His wife; his young niece; Shula’s grown, often drunk cousin (Elizabeth Chisela). The women are just supposed to compartmentalize and move on — something the matriarchs seem largely on board with.
Shula reads one of her auntie’s words, presumably for an obituary: “You were not just a brother, but also a father figure. … Ever jovial and joyous. A person who was fair.”
Photo: AP
Done in quick succession with her young cousin Bupe’s confession that she too was a victim of the deceased, words like “father figure” and “jovial” echo with malice.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl shares some spiritual DNA with Women Talking, in which mothers pass on traumas and secrets and the cycle goes on, despite even the best of intentions. Nyoni and her cinematographer David Gallego make this a transportive, stylish and unforgettable experience that powerfully transcends the specifics of its setting, while also taking audiences into an culture that’s likely unfamiliar.
The ending is not what one might call conclusive, but perhaps a litmus test for the individual viewer as to whether or not they’ll exit with hope or dread for what’s to come. And regardless, when you take a step back, Guinea Fowl cements the exciting arrival of a true filmmaker.
Photo: AP
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