In 2017, unganu Nyoni made an arthouse breakthrough with her witty and singular misogyny parable I Am Not a Witch. This time around, she has delivered something rather different: a sideways glancing, self-aware, often darkly comic family drama about sexual abuse. Its final moments do indeed deliver some of the magic realism promised by the title but its playfully and sometimes shockingly surreal images perhaps sit uneasily alongside the essential seriousness of this film’s concerns. For all its fascination as an idea an almost absurdist examination of what avoidance looks like and how families choreograph their collective denial there is also something a little contrived about it and though I was always absorbed I did find myself longing for some outright passion or rage or confrontation.
Shula (Susan Chardy) is driving a car down a dark road in Zambia, wearing an odd sci-fi outfit, we will learn why later on but they lend these events a gloss of dreamlike weirdness she stops the car, gets out to look at what appears to be Uncle Fred’s body lying by the side of the road, oddly peacefully dead, eyes staring blankly up into nothingness. He could have been brought here by one of the sex worker employees from the brothel next door after having had some kind of fatal seizure.
Seeing her dead uncle seems to provoke in Shula a sort of strange impassivity. She tries to call her unreliable dad who refuses to help, her mother (Fred’s sister) collapses into intense but somehow performative grief. At first Shula finds Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), her rambunctious anarchic cousin who gives a tremendous performance, intensely irritating but soon forms a connection with her, especially when Nsansa begins telling stories about what Uncle Fred tried to do to her when she was little.
It falls to Shula and Nsansa to arrange Uncle Fred’s elaborate funeral, but as they realise the extent of his history of sexual violence, almost all apparently aware of it at some level of consciousness join in a strange displacement activity: the extended family blame Fred’s miserable, timid widow for not having looked after him properly and accuse her and her family of being unfit to inherit his estate. Denial merges with greedy self-interest.
Meanwhile Shula is haunted by memories (dreams?) of a kids’ TV show she used to watch animals and stuff, there was an episode about guinea fowls whose squawking can function as an alarm call warning other animals of a predator nearby. If only there’d been a guinea fowl to sound the alarm about Uncle Fred when he was alive.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a film that works obliquely towards its meanings and effects, and shows that some of the ritual spectacle may be not just about denial but also about working through emotions. It’s nice when so much cinema wants only to spoon feed you everything and remove any possible ambiguity. But I did feel that the drama could have given us more, that Susan Chardy is such an excellent actor who could have been allowed to give us more too, however this film has got smarts and talks straight to its audience.
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