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  • Saint-Louis Blues. Original title: Un Transport en Commun
  • Marie-Magdeleine Chirol
Dyana Gaye. Saint-Louis Blues. Original title: Un Transport en Commun. 2009. France and Senegal. French, Wolof, with English subtitles. Africa First: Volume One. 48 min. Focus World, USA. $14.98.

Dyana Gaye, a Franco-Senegalese director who holds a Master’s degree in film from Paris 8, has given Senegalese cinema a breath of fresh air with Saint-Louis Blues (Un Transport en Commun, 2009), a musical comedy filled with a charm and humor that recalls early Hollywood musicals, especially the world of the French director Jacques Demy. This fourth short feature by Gaye took first prize in the Muhr Asia Africa Short Films category at the Dubai International Film Festival in 2009, was the Best French Short Film at the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival of 2010, and earned the UEMOA Integration Award at FESPACO 2011. Nominated in 2011 to the Césars, this movie now belongs to the collection Africa First, Volume 1 (2011), introducing five new African filmmakers.

At the end of summer, six passengers find themselves at the Dakar bus station boarding a bush-taxi to take them to Saint-Louis, a coastal city in Senegal. The long wait for a seventh passenger to fill the car (and reduce the cost of the trip) provides the material for the first song, in which each imagines the unknown passenger’s life and his reasons for not being at the station. At last the taxi takes off without him. Eventually the seventh passenger, [End Page 190] a young French student, connects with the rest of the group after the taxi driver’s colleague drops him off on the taxi’s route. Over the course of the journey, and to the rhythm of songs, the passengers get to know one another’s stories, and the reasons each has for traveling.

That same day, a boy, his father, and a young hairdresser are traveling in another car on the road to Saint-Louis. The hairdresser has left Dakar abruptly, without informing her employer-aunt, who, as it turns out, is one of the passengers on the bush-taxi. The fate of all these travelers is knit together in a complex web of crossing paths that will happily, in the end, bring everyone to their destinations.

The film has at its core serious subjects such as separation, exile, death, and the socioeconomic situation in the country, but it frames these between lighter topics such as questions of hair color, weaves, and styles in a Dakar hair salon. Through eight prerecorded songs (six in French, two in Wolof), the passengers evoke a wide range of subjects that show their various states of mind as they begin their trip and proceed toward Saint-Louis. Although often serious, the tone stays lively and the attitude positive. The cheerful nature of this comedy is largely due to its happy ending, but also to the many humorous notes, from the melon-laden truck into which the bush-taxi collides, to the more finely drawn setting of the hair salon, worthy of comparison to the umbrella shop in Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). The salon sofa, covered in a fake leopard skin—perhaps a reference to Mody Sall, nicknamed the Tiger of Colobane, whose wrestling match is the important event in Saint-Louis on the day of the passengers’ journey—brings a smile with its incongruity when it ends up in the countryside. The first words sung by the driver, “The engine is running,” have the same surprise effect as those of Guy who sang “The engine still knocks when it’s cold” forty-five years earlier in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. As in the New Wave film, the universe of Saint-Louis Blues favors fantasy and the imaginary.

The opening and closing shots of Saint-Louis Blues, the mirror reflections of characters in the hair salon, the big band music of Baptiste Bouquin, the complementary colors and patterns of the characters’ outfits, and the numerous temporal references likewise place Saint-Louis Blues firmly in the lineage of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Still, the distinction of Saint...

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