Grigris by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (review)

In many sub-Saharan African countries, a “gri-gri” is an amulet that brings good luck or chases away evil. In Haroun’s film, Grigris is a young dancer with a paralyzed leg. He dances every night in a bar, whose owner understands that he is a rare jewel able to bring in substantial sums of money for the club despite his handicap. However, Grigris is far from being rich: when his father-in-law falls seriously ill, he has no choice but to look elsewhere for more money. He immediately begs the owner of the bar to let him join his other business: oil smuggling.

During the day, Grigris works as a tailor with his father-in-law—“not even his real father,” as one character says—and sometimes, when some particular customers request it, he transforms the tailoring shop into a photographic studio. His quest for the 700,000 francs needed to pay off hospital fees becomes the quest to which many Chadians would relate, in a country ranked 184 out of 186 by the 2013 United Nations Human Development Report. Referring to oil-producing countries such as Chad, Tina Rosenberg wrote that “oil is the world’s most capital-intensive industry, so it creates few jobs. Worse, it obliterates jobs all across the economy” (“Avoiding the Curse of the Oil-Rich Nations,” The New York Times, Feb. 13, 2013). In spite of apparent governmental moves toward greater transparency, oil revenues remain a source of political resentment in the Chadian civil society (see Charlotte Bozonnet, “Missing Oil Revenue Stirs Discontent among Chad’s Poor,” Guardian Weekly, May 21, 2013).

And yet one might say that this movie is not about any of these topics. Grigris himself speaks very little, and when he does, his comments are sharp and short: “I need money,” or “I need a better job” do not convey anything about his life and character. The film is not about dance either, since the focus of the plot is the nascent love relationship between Grigris and Mimi, a prostitute working in the same bar. More generally, it is about individuals separated by their own desperate needs.

Shortly after they meet, Grigris and Mimi cling together for the duration of a slow dance. He is shorter and thinner than she is, and when he leans his head on her breast he seems to be the fragile one. Just as in a contemporary “Beauty and the Beast,” Mimi’s beauty appears threatening and ambiguous, although for the most part she remains obscure, functioning largely as a counterpoint to Grigris in the film’s examination of people whose bodies are for sale. On the one hand there is Grigris, disabled but still able to control his moves and applauded for his talent; on the other hand there is Mimi, gorgeous but alienated and sexually exploited. The contrast is pushed even further. While long shots focus on the muscular backs of oil smugglers carrying cans with great effort and revealing the tragic beauty of lower-class workers, Grigris’s disability no longer appears as a blessing that spares him from great danger; it is merely a ban from the job market. Bodies are portrayed in their crudest simplicity: Grigris plays with his disabled dancing leg, Mimi exists only when she shows off her voluptuousness, and the smugglers are constantly running from the police. Haroun engages with highly sensitive subjects: disability, prostitution, and oil smuggling, but he does so without pathos, without a preexisting notion of good and evil, and without “disembodying” the humanity of his characters, even when their lives are deprived of even the bare necessities.

The movie thus explores, with great skillfulness, a world of shifting values. Grigris is willing to do anything to find the money he needs, including lying and stealing, with no fear of dishonoring himself. By setting the action within the context of the informal economy, Haroun raises a wider question: what happens when transgression becomes the norm? How does it affect a society...