Carmen carries on

Senegalese dances past its censors.

By Susan Gerhard

Karmen Geï

WE ARE NOT rolling a tape from the Mitchell Brothers oeuvre as a tall, lanky beauty in a prison yard lap-dances on her lady warden. We are not even paging through the Roger Corman catalog as the seduction scene closes in on flapping legs and barely covered crotch. We are looking at a traditional dance, extrapolated, on the former slave-trading headquarters of Senegal's Goree Island in a film called Karmen Geï, Joseph Gaï Ramaka's boisterous interpretation of Carmen. Shackles, along with prison-issue thong underwear, quickly get removed when Karmen of the title slips into bed with her captor. The fully voyeuristic camera caresses her body, pausing over the sweat glistening on her upper thigh before sending her out to the world to join the 52 other film versions of Carmen in wreaking polyamorous all-points-alert havoc.

It's said to be Africa's first musical, and it certainly has to be Africa's first musical threatened by machete- and gasoline-wielding crowds. The expanding genres of African film have apparently just been stretched to the breaking point. When it premiered at Ramaka's theater in Dakar, a journalist exploited the moment to write an inflammatory article. Three hundred people arrived at the theater's doorstep ready to literally chop down actor, director, and his projector and theater and burn the whole lot. They got to the projectors and confiscated the film, but at least one copy has escaped to the States, along with its star, Djeïnaba Diop Gaï, whom I spoke with from her sister's house in Atlanta.

Before the film, Gaï was an anonymous sophisticate: a French Machiavelli scholar returning to Dakar, where she grew up, to get more funding. She went from model to casting director to star in this first gigantic leap into moviemaking. Now she's moved on to recluse: she says people who live in Senegal generally believe her to be a prostitute. The role that catapulted her to such a foundational place in the imagination has to be the most symbolically rich and fiercely danced Carmen of them all, a Carmen of martial-arts power and bullfighting intensity, one that reaches past borders out into the African diaspora from its Goree Island staging ground.

Not all the censure of this Karmen had to do with sexuality; one large piece of the protest sprang from the Islamic poem sung over the dead body of a Catholic character. It's an appropriate anger given the story line of Carmen, whose essence lies in the tangle of language and law and custom. This version tweaks the identities of the lovers, but they're still star-crossed. Their story is told in a dance language not practiced in contemporary Senegal, the Ndei Geï. Here it becomes a female territorial marker, particularly when Karmen interrupts her paramour's wedding with a dance titled "I Am the One" and denounces the police officer and the government he represents as evil. Then, in a dancing duel that becomes almost comic, she takes his bride to the mat. And just in case you think I exaggerate the proportions of Karmen Geï's female aggression, I give you this line from the bar-owning matriarch who is Karmen's mom: "Your navel is as big as your anus," she tells the police officer, "but you don't shit with it."

Freedom is not an abstract concept to Ramaka, who boycotted Fespaco (the pan-African film festival) for political reasons, and he utilizes every conceivable aesthetic dimension to demonstrate that point in this film, from the mix of pasts and presents – a vibrating jazz score, sabar drummers, call-and-response song, sexy folk dance, designer duds and traditional robes – to his very pointed political jabs. This Karmen, a towering, impudent, imposing persona whose stomp carries weight, celebrates some future end to constraints of both pre- and postcolonial eras, gendered and non-. She literally, physically, slips out of captivity whenever she finds herself in knots. Even in death, in a dress so red it bleeds before it has to, Karmen makes her escape the wildly flamboyant and defiant gesture it needs to be.

'Karmen Geï' opens Fri/2 at the Castro Theatre, S.F., and Fri/9 at the Rafael Film Center, San Rafael. See Rep Clock, in Film listings, for show times.