A team of African mercenaries encounters supernatural foes in this fable-like adventure.
Revenge, trauma, child exploitation and environmental degradation — all of these, to one extent or another, undergird the feverish momentum of “Saloum,” a picture that proceeds with more visual brio than narrative clarity.
And that’s before we even encounter the story’s supernatural elements. Skipping blithely across genres — for simplicity’s sake, let’s call it a paranormal adventure — the movie opens in 2003, in the middle of a military coup in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa. Under cover of the chaos, three infamous mercenaries known collectively as Bangui’s Hyenas (robustly played by Yann Gael, Roger Sallah and Mentor Ba) abscond with a Mexican drug lord (Renaud Farah) and his gold bullion. En route to Dakar, Senegal, their plane comes to grief, forcing them to land in the remote Saloum region to repair and refuel.
Posing as innocent travelers, the men arrive at a coastal vacation camp run by the suspiciously magnanimous Omar (Bruno Henry), who dispenses chores to his guests in lieu of rent. The environmental boon of some of these tasks — planting mangroves to stabilize the coastline; fighting poachers who fish with explosives and destroy the ecosystem — is touched on only lightly, but they add gravity and texture to a screenplay, by the movie’s Congolese director, Jean Luc Herbulot, that’s often skittishly unfocused. References to the region’s history and ancestral myths whoosh past, the emphasis always on eyes over ears, action over explanation. This is a movie that’s constantly exhorting us to keep up.
Occasionally, things slow to allow the resort’s other guests to pose particular threats. There’s a police captain who might be tailing the mercenaries, and a mysterious woman (a wonderful Evelyne Ily Juhen) who can neither hear nor speak. Her bold exchanges with the Hyenas, conducted entirely in sign language, are every bit as creative as the whirling clouds of evil that are eventually unleashed. These dark dervishes, seemingly comprised solely of dirt and leaves and primal malice, are ingeniously symbolic, as if the land itself were rising to avenge past crimes.
Punctuated by Gregory Corandi’s gliding, God’s-eye shots of meringue-colored desert and placid shoreline, “Saloum” has the extravagance of fable and folklore. The plot is ludicrously jam-packed, but the pace is fleet and the dialogue has wit and a carefree bounce — right up to the moment when our Hyenas realize their greatest danger could come from one of their own.
Saloum
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
