MOZART QUARTER
I cannot tell a lie. I couldn’t follow all the plot details of Mozart Quarter–Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s delightful comic fantasy about contemporary sex relations in a working-class neighborhood in Yaounde, Cameroon–even after I saw it a third time. Some of my confusion was probably due to the subtitler’s effort to render part of the French African dialogue in American inner-city slang–an understandable goal, but one that sometimes sacrifices lucidity for superficial familiarity and occasionally produces outright gibberish. Another problem is that certain Western cultural artifacts have meanings specific to the oral story-telling culture out of which Mozart Quarter arises.
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The 26-year-old Bekolo–a veteran of Cameroonian and French television who has edited music videos with African musicians–cites as two of his main inspirations for making Mozart Quarter Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which he saw in Paris while taking a screen-writing course with French film theorist Christian Metz, and Lee’s book Inside Guerilla Filmmaking. Shot for only $30,000 in the neighborhood where Bekolo was born and grew up, his picture is remarkably slick and quite modern in style–the influence of Lee is everywhere–but its content and overall thrust is something else. To call it an African equivalent of She’s Gotta Have It makes sense only if one also acknowledges that it has elements Spike Lee–and American filmmakers in general–knows next to nothing about.
Special Correspondent–the brother of Samedi and son of Mad Dog, the local police chief–reminds us that he runs “your” errands and has a file on “you.” A female friend of Samedi’s declares, “If you only think, you’ll never act [the subtitle says ‘do’ instead of ‘act’]. Samedi does, then whatever will be, will be.” Good For Is Dead (Timoleon Boyongueno), a merchant and tightwad, informs us, “Because you’re a brother, you want credit.” And Mad Dog (Jimmy Biyong), the corrupt police chief and all-around meddler in local affairs, asks and answers his own question: “You know what Mad Dog is around here? Mad Dog is my combat name.”
Bekolo also has a lot of fun charting local gossip–the clearest indication of his debt to an oral tradition–among males and females alike. Various neighborhood busybodies often serve expository and choral functions rather like those of the townspeople at the beginning of Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, and their interest in and amusement at what’s going on prove to be infectious; the movie often orchestrates their commentaries like riffs.
