2005 ‘Les Saignantes’ Directed by Jean-Pierre Bekolo
Best friends Majolie and Chouchou are two beautiful young women trying to get ahead in a near-future Cameroon. After accidentally killing a powerful politician during sex, the two come up with a plot to dispose of the body, and get into the glamorous wakes that have taken over the local nightlife.
A film that challenges you to understand its context, a work that screams at you to take into your experience of watching it the world it was crafted in, this is a vicious political and social commentary that takes refuge in humor in many varieties: irony, gore, fantasy, and what may have been a pun or two (hard to say with the language barrier). Two sex workers (possibly queer? Criterion seemed to think so) drawn on the matriarchal legacy of their culture to survive the violent political landscape they end up in. Even as the film demands you draw in the reality this was made in, it slowly unravels any realism the film might have had to begin with. By…
a story about women aspiring towards futurity in the face of postcolonial dystopia
the opening with her doing an erotic dance dangling by her hips from the ceiling...i was floored ! let that be me!
apparently 'mevoungou' refers to a kind of ancestral feminine wisdom/secret ritual celebrating women's reproductive capacities amongst Beti people in Cameroon, largely suppressed by French colonizers. the chorus of older women who kept popping in and out of the narrative can only represent some kind of guardians of this tradition i can presume. loved the fact that this tradition was harnessed by the women, that they gave themselves up to this force without completely understanding how it was affecting them, to combat corrupt politicians, abusers, and…
Jean-Pierre Bekolo's The Bloodettes (or Les saignantes, or Those Who Bleed, or whatever the hell I'm supposed to call it in English...) opens with a sex scene that feels far more like a performative art installation than a scene from an actual movie. That feeling never quite leaves the film, as Bekolo channels all the worst instincts of a student filmmaker; low quality shooting, annoying aesthetic choices and an ambitious plot without the wherewithal or skill to properly unpack it.
Admittedly, I have less of an understanding of the concept of afro-futurism than I'd like (apparently A Tribe Called Quest counts?), so The Bloodettes may be (and clearly is) looked upon more favourably by those with the added context. What…
"How can you make an action film in a country where acting is subversive? How can you make a horror film in a place where death is a party? How can you film a love story where love is impossible? How can you make a crime film in a country where investigation is forbidden?"
These are some of the questions The Bloodettes asks on billboards in its fourth-wall-ruptured sequence transitions. The year is 2025, and two women team up to dispose of the nation's secretary general's corpse after one of them fucks him and he dies. It's a nighttime odyssey, stylish and giallo-esque. They meet many sleazy men along the way--taxi drivers, policemen, more powerful political men.
The women share…
invented facetiming with another astral plane to contact a group of ur female ancestors so they can help you escape the police pursuing you for murder
Brixton Community Cinema is screening this film this Thursday (27th) for 🎃Halloween🎃. At the screening there will be a very cool zine with lots of cool stuff in it for you to read with ur eyes, i wrote something for it about this film, specifically about where Bekolo was coming from, and the origins of Mevoungou (it's clit magic... i'm not joking....)
Anyway IF YOU LIVE IN LONDON YOU SHOULD GO AND SUPPORT UR LOCAL INDEPENDENT CINEMA
Get ur tickets HERE — donations are appreciated !!!
I don't totally understand what this movie is about. I wrongly assumed that it was a vampire film. I guess they're more like witches? Kind of a confusing mess. It's really nice to look at but the plot is convoluted and deliberately boring. The parts that are interesting are barely explored, like the coven of Bloodettes that eat giant grub worms and drink ecto cooler out of oversized novelty martini glasses while playing dress-up in a bedroom with a poster for Scream. Can I get a whole movie that's just THAT.
An African exploitation/horror satire that does everything it can think of to invert the misogynist, gendered tropes of the genre -- it even tries to dismantle the primacy of the male gaze. (Yeah, I know -- good luck with THAT...). Something about two ambiguously lesbian women, attuned to some orisha or other that they can't really control, who do battle against the vampires in Cameroon's government. Mostly by teasing them sexually until they die of heart failure.
If only it had been good enough -- funnier, maybe, or more coherent -- to live up to its promise. Still... the underlying concepts were dazzling, so it's at least a very very very very very very noble failure.
Aesthetically stunning with a series of themes that match in intensity! Simultaneous with the impressiveness of it all though is an odd sense of detachment for me personally as a viewer. I think that absolutely comes, at least in part, from my own privilege. Its triumphs outweigh my overall neutral feelings towards it though!
shoutout to Brixton Community Cinema for throwing this on ❤️❤️❤️
Leaves no choice but the viewer to engage it in its entire context and material existence of being a film from the state of Cameroon, uses its editing to break away from film’s own trappings as a form, channeling a Godardian free spirit and a knowledge of genre cinema to break for a future, in structures where there’s no allowance for a future; patriarchal structures amongst colonial modes of production, paid for with body and ass, fought with love and solidarity between women
