Making Sense of Bamako… or not.

I found Bamako very long and tedious (partly because I watched it right after finishing Hyenas, which had the same sort of feel), and after finishing it, I was not entirely sure what it was about. Therefore, I went on IMDB, Wikipedia, Rotten Tomatoes, and other review sites to figure out what others had said about the film. All of the synopses said essentially the same thing – that the film depicts both a troubled couple coping with their problems and the very important trial… and that it “approaches both subjects with equal skill and success” (Rotten Tomatoes).

Sure, I understood the trial, and I thought that the arguments against the World Bank and the IMF were very well presented and thought out. Some of the witnesses point out issues that I would have never thought about (I probably wouldn’t have even considered the negative effects of the World Bank in general, let alone more specifically the problems with, for example, the high interest placed on African nations’ debt), and the direction and screenplay seem to forcefully emphasize the idea of accountability, which I think is a very valuable contribution. The witnesses put faces and names to the numbers, providing a more personalized view of policies which many people probably never think twice about, especially not in terms of anything besides numbers and dollars. In this way, the film is effective, getting across a new take on an important post-colonial message without sounding too preachy.

I absolutely did not catch on to the storyline of the couple, however. Even now after reading many synopses and reviews, I can’t place who the husband was in the film (I remember the woman more vividly, especially her singing – which I now understand was symbolic). I found the shots of the ordinary, every day life to be mildly interesting, but I didn’t find that it formed a cohesive story.