Tey / Today by Alain Gomis (review)

Death sometimes comes violently, accidentally, unexpectedly, allowing no time to look back at one’s life. But that’s quite rare. Death is often drawn out. Occasionally, some stage it, as did Samuel Fuller when he asked Wim Wenders to follow his own death in the truly beautiful Lightning Over Water (1980). It gave a sense of life flashing before his eyes, in random bursts—in this state of acedia that characterizes the transition to death, just as awakening does that of a newborn to life, that very same state that Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd poetically portrayed behind veils, or in chiaroscuro, when he filmed his mother’s final moments in The Sleepers / Le cercle des noyés (2007).

Might we not see this state as that of our world at a loss for references and markers? This in-between state, this state of vacillation, of unease, of anxiety, this limbo of a world wondering what the future might hold after the economic and ecologic crises it is currently in? This state is one well known to Africans, who for the last five centuries could not control their future, even after their highly uncertain independence. Today, we certainly ought to listen to the experience of the uncertain, we who are so afraid of the unforeseeable!

It is this enduring moment that Alain Gomis films magnificently in Today. The film’s title is particularly apt: a day, the present. This man, Satché, who comes home to die, knows, as do all those around him, that he only has a day left to live. Throughout the film, he barely speaks a word, because it is the others who speak for him; it is his life that unwinds like a film, that comes to meet him. Everyone is there to bid him a final farewell. It’s a celebration and a bittersweet introspection at the same time, the film changing rhythm according to the stages of this life journey. It’s above all not a biography (the linear, deathbed narrative that Hollywood would have made); it’s an intimacy. It is shrouded in mystery, for only snatches of a person’s life need be unveiled if we are to avoid trapping them in their past. Today, beyond Satché, it is the present of a people confronted with death. The film is set in Dakar and it is the Senegalese who are demonstrating against the high cost of living, and who accompany the one about to die. But beyond Senegal, it is a human being looking back at—and inevitably evaluating—his life. He doesn’t make a discourse of it; the film takes charge of that with incredible poetry, depicting his encounters with intense musicality, calling, through a reverse tracking shot of the street, or the camera angles in a room, upon references that range from the musical to the gangster movie and to amorous dance. This is where the emotion lies, when the connection that exists with the things that keep us alive springs forth from this mystery. This silent and enigmatic character makes us consider our own lives, fears, audacity, our “dirty little secrets,” as Deleuze put it, and our splendors. It’s the spectator that this mystery mobilizes, in his/her own present.

If there is a trajectory in Alain Gomis’s cinema, it is indeed this: characters teetering on the verge of imbalance in an unpredictable world and who gradually build themselves the courage to be present. El Hadj, the Senegalese student who suddenly finds himself without his temporary resident papers in L’Afrance / As a Man (2001), is a man on the edge until he realizes that his country is where his two feet are. Yacine in Andalusia (2007), eyes and mouth wide open, looks at the world around him in a state of perpetual amazement. “King of space,” he has no ties, is an outsider in this world that he watches bereft of illusions. He will have to...