Tag Archives: Senegal

Reviews: Zero

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Zero,
Directed by Jean Luc Herbulot,
Starring Hus Miller, Cam McHarg, William Defoe, Gary Dourdan, Annabelle Lengronne

Back in 2022, at a late-night screening in the Cameo Cinema during the Edinburgh International Film Festival (by the way, keep watching here for this year’s EIFF reports coming next month!), one of the festival’s programmer’s gave a glowing introduction to a film called Saloum, describing it as part of a new-wave of self-confident movie making coming out of Africa. They were not wrong, Saloum was one of my favourites from that year’s EIFF selection, a film I’d picked more on a vibe than on knowing much about it beforehand (see here for my review).

So when I was offered a chance to review Zero, another Senegal-set movie from the same director, Jean Luc Herbulot, I was intrigued to see what he had done now, and while there were some stumbling points (especially when socio-political subtexts become too foregrounded), for the most part this was a high-energy, thrilling ride, and again, as with Saloum, it was very cool to see work like this coming out of the African film scene.

The main plot device is wonderfully simple and has echoes of Western action-thrillers like Speed or Phone Booth, or even elements of Saw: an American businessman, Hus Miller, wakes up on a local bus in Dakar. He’s discombobulated, to say the least. The last thing he remembers is getting off the plane, thinking of his posh hotel, now he’s in some poor neighbourhood in a bus, missing all his belongings, and with no idea how the hell he got here, and as he freaks out, the locals around him go from puzzled to antagonistic to his panicked shouting. But worse is to come…

A young woman hands him a phone and earpiece, telling him she was paid by a mysterious Someone to give them to him, then leaves. As he stands up, he finds he has a cardboard sign around his chest, with the name of his bus stop on it, but when he takes it off, the rest of the passengers scream and run off the bus, quite sensibly, given the removal of the crude sign reveals that he has a bomb strapped to his chest, with a ten hour countdown on it…

Moments before, a radio news piece on the bus had reported, in French, that a person had blown up a part of the city, and police are hunting suspected terrorists, so right away in the opening moments we get a hint that this isn’t just happening to one person. He’s all for giving himself over to the police, but when his phone rings, he finds the person orchestrating all of this (the purring voice of William Defoe, channelling just a little bit of Charles Townsend’s reasonable tones from Charlie’s Angels) warning him if he does that, he will certainly die. His only option is to follow his instructions, which soon lead to more short missions which he has little choice but to attempt.

It isn’t long before he is brought together with a second American in the same predicament (McHarg’s hulking, larger, man of violent action). Neither is named; Miller is simply One, McHarg is Two. They are now forced into more missions for this phone voice, who is tracking them by GPS and watching them with a drone – any attempt to deviate will lead to a big bada-boom, completion of increasingly difficult tasks should lead to freedom and continuing to exist in a non-exploded form.

I won’t go much further into the set-up here, as much of the joy here is seeing what hoops the unlikely pair will be forced to jump through (very unwillingly), and it cracks along at a fair old pace, with Herbulot showing he still has a flair for style as well as action and tension. There’s a bit of sag in the middle (to be fair it’s hard to keep that pace up for the entire length of the film), and as it goes along we find that there is indeed a lot more going on than just these two being used as unwilling pawns, with a larger scheme going on involving other strands that are all part of the phone man’s masterplan, which I won’t spoil, but it does involve the way locals live in relation to uncaring Western powers.

No, it’s not perfect, and some of the final reel perhaps explains more than it should – some of this worked better when it was subtext and hinted at rather than made explicit, at least for me – but overall the pace keeps you going, and, like Saloum it is undeniably stylish, exciting and cool.

Zero is in selected UK cinemas from July 25th, and on digital platforms from 11th August

This review was originally penned for Live For Films

Edinburgh International Film Festival – Saloum

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EIFF 2022 – Saloum,
Directed by Jean Luc Herbulot,
Starring Yann Gael, Evelyne Ily Juhen, Roger Sallah, Mentor Ba, Bruno Henry

The programmer introducing Saloum to a late-night Edinburgh International Film Festival crowd was eager to share their enthusiasm for Saloum, describing it as part of a bold, new, confident strand of film-making coming out of Africa. Shot mostly in the French language, I felt this Senegalese movie lived up to its glowing introduction at the festival. We start off with what looks like a massacre in an African town, bodies everywhere, civilians and military alike, and three mysterious figures walking among the bodies – the Bangui Hyenas – leader Chaka (Yann Gael) , Rafa (Roger Sallah) and Minuit (Mentor Ba). You’re given the strong impression the mayhem and body count has come from these three figures swaggering through the streets, and then we find out they are extracting an international drug smuggler to help him out of the country, for a sizeable amount of gold.

However not all is at is often seems in this very cool, slick, stylish African flick; first impressions are these are just three gunsels – cool perhaps, but criminals, thugs – happy to leave a line of bodies in their wake. Except as the film progresses we hear stories about the Hyenas, and despite the tough guy posturing, we start to learn of very different views of them, that they’ve interfered against despots, helped movements and other rather more heroic actions. It’s a good strategy as it means you can’t just peg the trio as one thing or another, good guy, bad guy, hero, villain, and it makes the mix far more interesting. It also establishes that they have a pretty formidable reputation that precedes them.

Their exit strategy with their drug lord is a light aircraft from a nearby airstrip, taking off as local reinforcements arrive too late to do much more than fire impotently in the air at the retreating plane, as our trio and their client relax. Except, of course, like any good plan or heist in a movie, something has to go wrong (otherwise we wouldn’t have much of a story, would we?!) – in this case they realise they are losing fuel, and assume a stray bullet hit the tank. They can’t make their original destination, but Chaka, the brains of the operation, comes up with a back-up plan, to land in the Saloum area of Senegal. Having hidden the plane and the gold, they set off on foot for a small, isolated resort of sorts that Chaka claims to know, saying to leave all the talking to him, and explaining after a couple of days of playing visitor there, they will scrounge fuel and some sealant to fix the fuel tank, and off they go. The other two are curious as to how Chaka knows this area and people, but follow him.

At the resort things start well enough, greeted by the seemingly affable Omar (Bruno Henry) who runs it, and meeting the deaf and mute guest Awa (Evelyne Ily Juhen) – which leads to an increasingly hilarious sign-language conversation between Awa and Chaka at the camp’s dinner table, as the others all watch on bemused. But quite quickly they realise Awa knows just who they are and wants something from them – is she for them or against? And Chaka hints at past interactions with Omar years ago, but Omar doesn’t recognise him. When a local police captain arrives for dinner, the tension ratchets ever upwards – have they been rumbled, or is it pure coincidence? Adding into this, Minuit and Rafa are starting to question Chaka’s motives, as it starts to look like he has some long unfinished business in this strange region, and they begin to wonder if it was an accident that brought them here or a plan…

This burns along nicely, building character interactions, establishing the surroundings, slowly increasing the sense of tension building, along with the unmistakable feeling that something here just isn’t right. I don’t just mean with the are they here by accident or secret plan, or how does a police captain and a deaf woman happen to be there and know who they are at just the right time. No, there’s more, especially when we see interactions with the nearest village – the people, the place, the whole land here is wrong, something dark, something bad, something not human, perhaps even cursed…

Saloum gleefully throws all sorts of ingredients into the pot – we get action, the daring escape/heist gone wrong, the emergency plan that may be far more than it appears, characters who keep evolving throughout, seemingly and obviously one thing only for us to learn more further in that changes our perceptions of them, it throws in some very slick and stylish action that would be at home in a Tarantino joint or a Hong Kong action flick, with elements of the Spaghetti Western, revenge thriller and outright horror movie too. It’s as prepared to mix knowing humour as it is to take on dark subjects, like the colonial abuses of the past and the use of child soldiers in many civil conflicts. It sounds like it should be overcooked, but it isn’t, somehow all these elements, mixed in at just the right time as the film progresses, all work together, and the narrative even takes a couple of turns I didn’t expect. Cool, stylish, an ideal late night movie treat from Africa.

This review was originally penned for Live For Films