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| Babetida Sadjo in Our Father, the Devil |
Cast: Babetida Sadjo, Souléyman Sy Savané, Jennifer Tchiakpe, Franck Saurel, Martine Amisse, Maëlle Genet, Hiba el Aflahi. Screenplay: Ellie Foumbi. Cinematography: Tinx Chan. Production design: Philippe Lacomblez. Film editing: Roy Clovis. Music: Gavin Brivik.
Ellie Foumbi's debut feature, Our Father, the Devil, is a thriller in which all the violent action occurs off-camera. When Marie (Babetida Sadjo) recognizes the new priest, Father Patrick (Souléyman Sy Savané), at the upscale French retirement home where she's the chef, she faints. She thinks he's the man she knew back in Guinea as Sogo, the warlord who raped her and forced her into his cadre of child soldiers. So one night when he comes to her kitchen after hours to ask for a snack, she knocks him out with a cooking utensil, hauls him into her car, and imprisons him in an isolated cabin. When he comes to, he denies that he was the man she once knew until she tortures the truth out of him. It's the setup for a moral fable that Foumbi tells quite well, and the absence of on-screen violence only heightens the tension and reinforces the film's treatment of the ethics of revenge. When Marie is torturing Father Patrick we see instead shots of her chopping vegetables and pounding a cutlet, which sounds comic in description but is really quite effective in the tense atmosphere Foumbi creates. Unfortunately, the tropes of thriller movies sometimes intrude. The scene when Marie and the hot bartender (Franck Saurel) she's been seeing consummate their relationship is gratuitous, and the sequence in which the roles of captive and captor switch back and forth is awkwardly handled. But it's superbly acted, especially by Sadjo and Sy Savané, and gives great promise of Foumbi's future as a director.
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