Belgian rapper Baloji’s feature debut Omen (Augure in French) starts with an image that might have come from a spaghetti western. To a whistled tune on the soundtrack a lone rider on horseback pitches up at a watering hole. Dismounting, the figure pulls one of her breasts from under her dark robes and squirts what looks like bloody milk into the water.
It’s an arresting and unsettling start to a film that mixes stuff like this – African magical realism, you could call it – with a seemingly mundane story of a black African and his white European wife-to-be back in the Congo to sort out some family business. For Koffi (Marc Zinga) this is a homecoming. For Alice (Lucie Debay) an opportunity to discover more about the father of her child. What Alice hadn’t reckoned on, though, is that Koffi’s family, his mother in particular, have always considered Koffi to be an evil sorcerer. Born with a birthmark supposedly denoting spirit possession, Koffi is also epileptic – more proof! – and when he has a nosebleed at an already fraught family gathering and a drop of his blood lands on the face of his sister’s new baby, all hell breaks loose. Koffi is soon in the middle of an exorcism ceremony complete with frightening masks, macabre costumes and all manner of weird juu-juu.
A modern man thrust back into the belief system of his forebears, Koffi is revealed as a complex mix of the new and the old. These beliefs, so tightly held by his family, are his birthright, and Baloji’s film is all about legacy, patrimony, heritage, and what we choose to do with what we’ve been given, the good and the bad.
He has three more stories to tell, which lend his film a quasi-anthological structure. First, Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya), a tough street kid whose gang dress in girlish pink costumes. They wear tiaras – it’s the street version of the “madman strategy” of game theory – and are in constant beef with another gang, clad all in black. There’s Tshala (Eliane Umuhire), Koffi’s sister, who rejects the superstitions of her country cousins and wants to live the modern life in the big city. She dreams of emigrating, but not to Europe – “Europe is dead since 2008” – South Africa beckons. And, finally, Koffi’s mother, Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua), an attempt here to ground Mujila’s rejection of Koffi as a baby in something rational. Ish.
That opening image sets up Baloji’s working method. The film operates in a recognisable reality but shifts into magical realism regularly. At one point it goes right off into the story of Hansel and Gretel as they tuck into the gingerbread house. And then just as suddenly we’re back in the everyday world of dust, bus journeys and humid hotel rooms, though interestingly Baloji presents the mundane and the occult as different sides of the same matter-of-fact coin, in the same way that the language spoken will shift from French to Swahili to English.
It’s refreshing to see the Democratic Republic of Congo portrayed in a way that’s nothing to do with ongoing conflict, and Baloji presents his characters as people who do not have their backs to the wall. They have choices, most obviously in the case of Tshala, where the film eventually decides to put down roots, as if Baloji had decided that the Koffi/Alice story just wasn’t glue enough and so decided on a mid-course correction.
Zinga and Debay make a plausible couple, but Umuhire (refreshing) and Gnahoua (fierce) also help Baloji’s film swing through its running time like it’s on a greased track. Special mention to Kabeya. His performance as frightened but tough street kid Paco is the best thing in the film (and Mordecaï Kamangu, as Simba, Paco’s opposite number in the rival gang is great too).
Omen aka Augure – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
