Félicité is two films featuring the same characters, smashed together arbitrarily into a single film. The first half is a social drama about life in a war-torn, underdeveloped country, while the second is a hallucinatory story of romance and motherhood. Both parts are highly derivative of other works, but the former manages to be engaging and entertaining, while the latter is both tedious and culturally chauvinistic. The film begins well enough, but its final act is close to appalling.
Félicité (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu) is a nightclub singer living in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Her 14-year-old son has suffered a horrific motorcycle crash, and is in a hospital bed with a compound fracture in his left leg. Félicité must find the funds to pay for a surgical operation to repair his injury or the hospital will have to amputate it. She gets robbed, calls in every favor she can and even conducts a very strange version of a break-in in order to get the money. It is to no avail; she is a bit short and her son loses his leg.
The second half of the film has very little to do with the medical plot of the first or with questions about the DRC’s broken social structures. Instead, it centers on Félicité and her sense of personal and emotional dislocation. She pursues something of a romantic relationship with the neighborhood handyman-drunk, Tabu (Papi Mpaka), but it never develops beyond a nascent stage and has ill-defined parameters regarding whether they may see others. Félicité takes on an ethereal, dream-like tone and style, but the editing is often illogical and writer-director Alain Gomis seems overmatched by this type of storytelling.
Shamelessly mimicking a number of recent, more successful films, the first half of Félicité is shot like a Dardenne brothers’ effort with a tracking camera following the protagonist around as she works to scrape together enough money for the surgery. The protagonist is like a Congolese version of Marion Cotillard’s Sandra from Two Days, One Night: A woman against the world pushed to her limit. This half remains fresh, however, because there just are not many films set in the DRC.
The DRC is finally emerging from one of the worst wars of the past half-century, and the tracking camera following Félicité around Kinshasa captures images not often seen in cinema. Its story and imagery match: The nation is now battered by a neoliberal political economy that emphasizes profit over people and by a state that has given up social responsibility for its citizens. The viewer sees city streets still unpaved, full of desperate, impoverished people. If someone needs surgery to live, they had better be able to pay. This same form of societal organization is coming to the US, too. This gives the film some vitality.
Felicité squanders this momentum quickly during its second half as it models itself on the works of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The Thai master is not so easily imitated, however, and the effort comes across as at best boring and at worst Orientalizing and neocolonial. There are superficial commonalities, after all, between the dense and mysterious rainforests of the DRC and those of Thailand. Because the style does not work, the dull second half could be viewed as Gomis, a Frenchman, reducing one postcolonial region to another.
Why not make a magical realist drama about the broken structures of society in France? It’s not as if the French countryside is devoid of misty forests and dark vales or that the nation is a utopia. The Dardennes, after all, critique Belgium, the DRC’s former imperial master, with every cinematic production. Why does Félicité have to be set in the DRC? Does the Congo remain simply a Portrait of Dorian Gray for Europe, an ugly mirror-image onto which Europe can posit its dark truths so as to avoid having to come to terms with itself? How about dealing with the truth: Europe, too, is ugly and broken, replete with all forms of both overt and symbolic violence and grinds people down with its brutality. Here’s hoping that the next time the DRC hosts a film crew, it can do so on its own terms and with a more thoughtful, creative team.
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