Hal Kitchen
What makes a Guinea Fowl, and why should you wish to become one? These questions might well occur to you upon reading the title of this A24 film and On Becoming a Guinea Fowl holds off on unlocking its titular metaphor. It’s rather straightforward once you hear the explanation in the final act of Rugano Nyoni’s sophomore feature, but the film’s meditative and mordantly funny approach to its dark and painful subject matter justifies this obscurity. If there’s one thing you can say about the writer-director of I Am Not a Witch, it’s that she writes a banger of a title.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl adopts a similar tone of gallows humor and mysticism to her earlier film, but where I Am Not a Witch explored childhood as a young girl growing up in rural Africa, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl follows up on the alienation and trauma of those formative years, examining the mark they leave and the culture of silence around confronting them. Though all its principal characters are adults, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is still very much about childhood, specifically girlhood.
In its dryly comic opening, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl introduces us to Shula (Susan Chardy), a comparatively emancipated young woman who happens to be driving home from a costume party when she recognizes the shape lying in the road as the body of her uncle, now evidently dead. From her laconic reaction, it’s clear she’s not exactly heartbroken to find him in this state. His death, and particularly her finding of his body, means she is going to have to confront the trauma of her past, and worse yet, her relatives.
Every culture has its own attitudes surrounding death. There’s no correct way to grieve but we also know what kind of conduct is expected of us, no matter where we come from. In most Western-European cultures, we don’t like to cause a scene. In many central African ones however, including the Zambian one depicted here, woe betide the woman who doesn’t make a big enough show of her mourning. The first thing Shula’s army of aunties do upon seeing her is chastise her for bathing. If you’re composed enough to wash you’re clearly not being respectfully distraught enough. Of course, your grief mustn’t inconvenience your family or get in the way of your mandatory catering duties, you’re a woman after all! You quickly sense that Shula has as little to do with her family as she can and just as quickly you understand why. They’re all either stern matricians or drunkards. However, through her enforced interactions with them, she begins to realize that the scars she had tried to forget are not just borne by her alone, and that there’s a long lineage of abuse in her family that everyone is refusing to acknowledge, and it goes deeper than one perverted uncle.
Slowly, the wry comedy of the film’s opening ebbs away, like the tide pulling back the rolling waves and revealing the mud beneath. The surreal edge remains though, and combined with Nyoni’s liberal use of dream sequences and visions, she’s able to continue finding creative sideways means to approach the inevitable. Further grounding the film are the fantastic performances. Shula’s numb, stoic exterior belies deep reservoirs of pain and isolation, and Chardy embodies those feelings with real authenticity and natural grace. The scene stealer though—and if there were any justice she’d be a front-runner in every best supporting actress race—is Elizabeth Chisela as Nsansa, Shula’s freewheeling cousin who floats above her trauma of a tide of booze and jocularity. But this is a film about all the women of this family really, and the sequence that hits the hardest comes when the aunties all come to see Shula and Nsansa and finally, if temporarily drop the bulls–t and confront their shared pain together, as women, as a family. There’s no mysticism or humor undercutting it, just a group of women bluntly letting each other know that they understand, and the result is one of the most devastating scenes I’ve witnessed all year.
Like I am Not a Witch, the film confronts some very harsh and tragic subjects, but what lingers with you are the moments of warmth and togetherness holding the characters together in their shared struggle. The tragedy though is that these moments are never allowed to dictate the lives of these characters, they are interludes, and the misogyny baked in around them will not permit these moments to last. Nyoni’s films do not provide resolutions or easy solutions. They simply present a society as it is, revealing its flaws while baring the souls of its people. With On Becoming a Guinea Fowl Nyoni has once again shown herself as an astute voice when it comes to exposing the dysfunction of a culture rarely seen onscreen. With the help of a good deal of bravery and a phenomenal cast, her instincts, both comic and tragic are leading her to create some truly unforgettable screen experiences.
Zambia isn’t in “West Africa.” This review reads as pretentious, shallow, and utterly contrived as the film itself. All of Nynoni’s films are bluntforce dogwhistling for westerners (and ethno-culturally insecure half-westerners) who cling to far-left Western ideals (be it neoliberal conceptions of feminism, racialism, etc.) in lieu of a genuine understanding of, and connection with, the people and culture they purport to speak for; all the while decepetively masking this truth by hiding behind the most lazy and overused narrative archetypes in European cinema and call it like “surrealism.” Nobody in Zambia finds these films interesting. All of the HOD crew are non-Zambians flown in from overseas, as is the funding. These films are conceived abroad, written abroad, and delivered abroad. They may be filmed in Africa but they are as authentically an “African film” as The Last Samurai is an authentically Japanese film.