‘Black Tea’: Berlin Review

Dir. Abderrahmane Sissako. France/Mauritania/Luxembourg/Taiwan/Côte d’Ivoire. 2024. 111mins.

A present sizzling subject in movie academia is ‘Transnational Cinema’ – the examine of interconnections, financial and cultural, between totally different nations in a globalised world order. It’s laborious to consider many movies which might be extra totally Transnational than Black Tea, the Berlinale competitors entry from Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako – an African-European-Asian co-production with Mandarin, French, English and Portuguese dialogue (plus singing in Bambara), about an African girl looking for a brand new life in China.

A magnetic central efficiency by Ivorian-French actress Nina Mélo

This may not appear a straightforward recipe for coherence, however Sissako holds all of it collectively for a superb whereas – not least due to a magnetic central efficiency by Ivorian-French actress Nina Mélo. Finally, nonetheless, the movie’s eclectic ambitions and more and more eccentric development get the higher of it, leading to a really uneven brew.

That is the primary movie in 10 years from Sissako, who is usually related to work of a strongly political tenor; notably Bamako (2006), which positioned worldwide banking on trial, and Timbuktu (2014), a caustically ingenious satirical response to militant Islamism. Black Tea additionally has its political dimension, as turns into extra explicitly evident in the direction of the top, however for a lot of its run it performs as a narrative of feminine self-liberation combined with a simmering inter-racial love story.

The movie begins with a teasingly odd close-up of a black insect crawling over a subject of white material, which seems to be a marriage gown. We’re in Côte d’Ivoire, at a ceremony the place a number of {couples} are to be married – amongst them, a younger girl named Aya (Mélo), who on the final minute decides to show down her philandering fiancé. A burst of the Anthony Newley/Nina Simone commonplace ‘Feeling Good’, carried out by Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara, leads us into Aya’s new life throughout the globe in Guangzhou, China (these sections have been in truth shot in Taiwan).

Guangzhou, it seems, has the biggest African inhabitants in Asia and an African quarter often known as ‘Chocolate Metropolis’, the place Aya connects with different immigrants, together with the workers at native hairdressing and nail salons. She has additionally began work at a specialist tea store run by a refined middle-aged man named Wong Cai (Taiwanese actor Chang Han), the divorced father of a 20-year-old son, Li-Ben (Michael Chang), who additionally works within the store.

Cai is teaching Aya within the expertise of tea connoisseurship within the store’s downstairs room, and their classes turn into more and more, although discreetly, intimate, Cai guiding Aya’s arms to point out her the exact artwork of pouring water and dealing with cups. Aya and Cai additionally begin having dinner dates, at certainly one of which Cai narrates a flashback to the times when he ran a restaurant along with his then-wife Ying (Wu Ke-Xi) and when he wasn’t fairly as gently empathetic as he has since turn into. Aya leaves, troubled, however the couple’s relationship continues in scenes of decorous tea-centred sensuousness, suggesting that the movie might simply have been referred to as The Scent of Issues. Actually, ‘Black Tea’ is the nickname given to Aya by Cai’s younger feminine assistant  – apposite, says Cai, as a result of black tea as soon as drunk reveals a brand new fascinating aroma, and that’s how he sees Aya.

Whereas we’re mulling over the aftertaste of those slightly compelled metaphors, the movie takes a weird facet journey, flying throughout the globe to the Cape Verde islands of Western Africa, the place Cai – after stopping off to take pleasure in some ballads within the native morna model – drops in on his ex-mistress and their 20-year-old daughter, who he hasn’t seen for years.

Again in Guangzhou, Aya and Cai are having fun with a quiet night when a shock go to from Ying, Li-Ben and his aged grandparents lays Chinese language racial prejudices on the desk, pushing the movie awkwardly right into a extra overtly political register – selecting up an earlier, roughly-sketched thread about Guangzhou’s African group being endangered. By this time, nonetheless, the movie has turn into too raggedly digressive to carry our consideration in order that, when Sissako pulls an totally indigestible last-minute switcheroo, the tea is nicely and actually spilledcand there is no such thing as a mopping it up.

The place Black Tea actually engages is within the scenes between Aya and Cai, which glow with quiet intimacy due to Chang Han’s mild urbanity, and particularly due to Mélo, whose earlier roles embody Soleils and Girlhood. Her coolly glamorous Aya exudes an elusive heat as a lady keenly attentive to others, reticent in revealing her personal emotions – a stance which performs properly in scenes that supply character sketches of the folks round Aya, notably Wen (Huang Wei), the harassed younger girl who runs a (symbolically laden) baggage store.

The movie can be remarkably good-looking, with DoP Aymeric Pilarski – who made his mark with 2019 Mongolian drama Egg – emphasising the comforting darkness of enclosed areas just like the tea store and Cai’s favorite restaurant, contrasting with the electrically-lit enclosure of Guangzhou’s buying malls. There’s additionally a beautiful sequence at a tea plantation, its rippled hillocks suggesting an enormous inexperienced mind – though Sissako can’t resist an infusion of kitsch within the form of a small, lovely (presumably VFX) butterfly. Armand Amar’s elegant rating mixes Chinese language violin and African kora, plus Diawara’s vocals, to alluring cross-cultural impact.

But nonetheless interesting the mix typically is, this wildly eccentric movie finally feels a couple of leaves in need of a pot.