A Screaming Man / Un homme qui crie by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (review)

Note: A Screaming Man was shown as a Cannes Film Festival Official Selection on Sunday, May 16, 2010, and awarded the Jury Prize on May 23.

Father and son, Adam and Abdel fool around in a pool, competing to see who can stay underwater the longest. The tension is already palpable as the son takes ages to resurface. The difference of their inscription in time is already obvious. We can guess it's not the first time that they have competed like this. But this time it's the son who wins, the father getting older. This son lives in the moment, always taking photos, full of life, and will take his father's place in what structures his life—his position as pool attendant; this son upsets the order of a father who is set in his ways, who doesn't like his neighbor disturbing his intimacy, and who suddenly feels very old when he has to relinquish his place to his son.

The situation is not straightforward, but if the war hadn't come and complicated their relationship, making Adam, the father, lose his head, it could have all been resolved with humor. Haroun regularly punctuates the film with comic moments which, far from weakening the dramatic content of the narrative, on the contrary heighten it. Like Hitchcock, Haroun believes in humor and triviality's power of amplification. Far more than a dramatic music score would have, or the crescendos of violence that Western films set in Africa cultivate so freely, tiny, seemingly innocuous details contribute most effectively to heightening the tension. A Screaming Man isn't somber; Adam evolves in the light, in clarity. The touches of humor bring him closer to us and give some relief to the spectator caught up in his tension. It is a very fine line to draw and gives us the measure of this director's level of mastery, a director who knows just how much the little elements of life construct a narrative more effectively than pedantic explanations. Ellipses and incertitude thereby destabilize us sufficiently to keep us constantly involved. Viewers are engaged undoubtedly, but not by ethical norms. Adam's choices do not conform to rules or customs—on the contrary. Initially indecisive, he ends up taking action once it's too late. Like us, he is anything but rational. But that does not absolve him of his moral responsibilities. This is the role that the filmmaker takes on: to awaken consciences, not to preach. He appeals to ethics, rather than predetermined models, which amounts to privileging the individual rather than the collective. Responsibility is everyone's, whereas duties are those of the group.

A Screaming Man is thus in direct continuity with Daratt / Dry Season (2006), Haroun's previous film. Rather than getting trapped in commonly accepted norms such as vengeance or pardon, the young Atim in Daratt asserted his own free will, thereby establishing himself as a thinking, acting individual, his own inventiveness being the only hope of escaping the vicious circle of violence. Adam does not play by the rules either. He doesn't calculate. He is quite simply human, in his weaknesses and his beauty, as capable of the worst as he is of the sublime, which is not without its ambivalence and guilt.

Adam bears the name of the first man on earth, and it is indeed this relationship to the origin that is in question. The paradigm of the father-son relationship nonetheless differs considerably from that which Souleymane Cissé depicted in Yeelen (1987), for example. If the father in both cases fears that his son will take his place, Cissé portrayed this archetypal opposition as embodying a fatal breakdown in transmission. In A Screaming Man, Adam and Abdel are the best buddies in the world. They complement one another looking after the pool until the new Chinese owner of the hotel plays them...