Xala

This is not just a treatise on post-colonialism and class. Sembène boldly uses his female characters to comment on Senegal's chauvinist patriarchy.

The actors are wonderful, especially the women who play El Hadji's first two wives - ladies of magisterial personality, social shrewdness and sexual pride. The wedding sequence in Xala makes the one in "Godfather I" look like a wedding party at McDonald's. This allegory of impotence in the body politic shows Sembene on his way to becoming an African Moliere. [13 Oct 1975]

It is part fable and part satire, but it is much more: with the greatest fineness and delicacy, Mr. Sembene, the Senegalese writer and director who made this picture, has set out a portrait of the complex and conflicting mesh of traditions, aspirations and frustrations of a culture knocked askew by colonialism and distorting itself anew while climbing out.

Xala means sexual impotence, and the film, culled from his own novel, is a brilliantly funny, ironic satire about post-colonial Senegal. [21 Dec 2000, p.13]

Sembène depicts a corrupt system that replaced white dictators and profiteers with black ones; the symbolic ending, a glimmer of revolutionary hope, is as gratifying as it is implausible.

Despite the rather washed-out color photography it's very much worth seeing.

The major problem with the film is that the exposition is not nearly as clever as the premise. After warming to the idea behind the movie, one tends to cool off as it trudges toward a resolution.