Simultaneously gripping, disconcerting, and chaotic, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki is an exhilarating cinematic ride. The 1973 drama — the first full-length film by the Senegalese director — is the fantastical narration of a young couple in Dakar, eager to escape the Senegalese capital for the allure of Paris. It’s a character-driven film in many ways, primarily centered on the couple’s adventures, but it is also a subtle visual examination of the urbanism of post-independence Dakar, where the city and its architecture are essential fixtures in a surreal storyline.
As Touki Bouki’s protagonists, Mory and Anta, scheme to obtain money for that lucrative trip to Paris, they are backdropped by a city in postcolonial flux, a settlement of contradictions and contrasts. In Mambéty’s 1968 Contras’ City, this is much more explicit, a mockumentary that juxtaposes Dakar’s grand colonial architecture with vibrant snapshots of the wooden and corrugated-iron-roof structures that house tailors and barbers. But with Touki Bouki’s jumpy, stop-start cinematic style, the processes of construction become one avenue with which to represent this postcolonial flux.
As the film introduces the busy setting of urban Dakar, the camera pans to an elevated vantage point, depicting construction workers around a crane as repairs are conducted on a bridge. In the middle of the film, an abandoned, run-down building in the wealthier part of the city is the site of an eerie yet comedic scene. A short while later, as Mory and Anta depart from a plush hotel in a motorcycle and car, the road they travel on seems freshly laid, with visible signs of construction rubble flanking the pair. The context Mory and Anta find themselves in is early 1970s Dakar, ten years or so removed from independence, as President Léopold Sédar Senghor’s infrastructural plans to orient Dakar as a cultural capital rapidly transform the cityscape.
In La Noire de…, released in 1966 and directed by Mambéty’s contemporary and compatriot Ousmane Sembène, the leftovers from Dakar’s period under colonial rule are fully exhibited in the disparate neighborhoods of Plateau and Medina. The latter — established as “native” quarters under French decree — is underdeveloped, while the former, the European neighborhood deliberately segregated from Medina, features chic Modernist apartments. Touki Bouki echoes this division, the Medina’s dusty streets home to homes with informal wooden planks haphazardly placed on their roofs, while where Mory gets accosted by university students — seemingly the campus — is green and ordered, with manicured lawns alluding to a location where Dakar’s elite reside.
But Touki Bouki’s urban critique of a fluctuating Dakar is perhaps strongest when it scrutinizes, through both static, lingering shots and hurried camera pans, a city existing between the rural and the urban. The onset of the film sees a young cowherd leading cattle on dry land sparsely populated by grass. Later, Mory rides his bike through Dakar’s wide-laned tarmac roads, by chance meeting a friend working as a traffic warden. A previous humorous scene features a uniformed man struggling to mount a heap of sand, as a lone horse grooms itself in the edge of the frame. It’s a challenging endeavor with multiple slips, but it’s a journey he must take to get to the level of the main road, where he can then attempt to hail a bus to take him into more urbanized Dakar.
Touki Bouki is an explicit visualization of the peri-urban condition, as agriculture, housing, and industry combine to create landscapes deeply hybrid in nature. What takes infrastructural precedence in this dichotomy is also made clear. The cowherd’s journey, perhaps into Dakar’s commercial areas, is through arid land. Where a neighborhood’s residents wash their clothes is on building fragments on dull brown sand, scattered trees populating the vista. In the university, however, the foliage is striking and healthy. The environment around Dakar’s economic heartbeat — the port — is similarly lush, the flowers vivid and colorful, the grass tamed and tranquil.
Dakar’s architectural landmarks do feature in the film — the distinctive, pedimented red-and-white Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Art-Deco-style Delegation Generale au Tourisme, but Touki Bouki is less interested in Dakar’s individual buildings and more absorbed in the intricate, heterogenous, and difficult story of the city.
As Mory and Anta dream of Paris throughout the film, the city of Dakar itself, to a certain extent, is dreaming of this European city as well — even a few years after the 1968 protests, where university students sought to resist the enmeshed societal and economic presence of France in Senegal. From the rural, to the urban, to the peri-urban. From sandy informal settlements to leafy suburbs, as much as Touki Bouki is an eventful narrative journey, it’s also, in its own way, a stimulating piece of architectural documentation.
All images are screenshots from the movie Touki Bouki, courtesy of Janus Films.
