This is #95 on the 2022 S&S list, and the last of the new-to-me movies. (The Shining and Chungking Express at #88, Parasite at #90, and Tropical Malady and Get Out tied at #95 are also new in 2022, but I’ve seen them before.)

So this is a Senegalese movie from 1966. Senegal achieved independence from France in 1960, and this is extremely a post-colonialist movie. The movie opens with an elegant Black woman arriving in France, where it turns out that she’s to be a servant to a white French couple. As the movie goes, we see in flashback how she met them in Senegal, and how she was their kids’ nanny there. And so she’s arriving here, thinking that it’s going to be much the same thing, supervising the kids as they’re out and about, seeing exotic France.

But: nope! The kids are off somewhere unspecified, and she’s going to be a housemaid. She cooks and she cleans, without cease or vacation. The couple is casually racist, their guests even more so, and it quickly becomes clear that they view her as something of a showpiece, an “authentic African,” and barely as a person at all. The movie is short (only an hour), so I won’t give more of the story than that, but yeah, it’s a movie with a simmering anger underlying it, and one that reads extremely contemporary to anyone in the present.

What’s fascinating is the American reaction to it on its release: The consensus opinion was that it was bland, simplistic, and didactic. Ebert notes that “little attempt is made to get into the minds of the characters. The maid’s white employers, in particular, are drawn as such broad caricatures that we never believe in them as flesh and blood.” The Village Voice is dismissive, but notes that it did win in a Tunisian film festival, so shrugs that apparently “the story worked more effectively on viewers who were formerly part of France’s colonial empire.” So inexplicable.

But it got a restoration in 2016 and a Criterion Collection release in 2017, and obviously a Trump-era American audience was a lot more receptive to what the film is delivering than white critics 50 years ago had been. (I suspect that restoration is probably as much a reason for its new presence on the list as the increased openness from poll respondents to work from Black filmmakers.)

And so yeah, it’s a searing piece of post-colonial anger in a way that’s obvious now, but feels like it should have been legible even back then, and obviously the whole point of it is to tell the story from the point of view of the Senegalese woman rather than the French couple, so the fact that their interiority is offscreen isn’t a flaw. That said, I do think the “didactic” criticism isn’t fully off the mark: The story is told in direct thought-narration from the protagonist, and it’s all sitting right on the surface. I kinda wish the film had been a bit longer and given her more depth and complexity. But that said, it’s not hard to see why Ousmane Sembène would have wanted to make this movie at this time, and it clearly did resonate with its intended audiences (and somehow whooshed over the heads of western audiences despite its straightforward explicitness), so ultimately I think you need to approach it on its own terms.