Lonbraz Kann, the first feature-length film by the Mauritian director David Constantin, opens with the pending closure of a sugar mill that has been the source of work for local inhabitants for several generations. Nearby, luxury villas are being constructed; a billboard advertises the arrival of “Your Private Eden”—luxury plantation-style villas. To make way for further developments, the homes of plantation workers are being razed and bulldozed. Chinese construction workers have been brought in to labor on the villas, and resentment is building among the unemployed workers. Some of the newly unemployed are descendants of indentured servants who migrated to Mauritius from India. Constantin and his co-writer, Sabrina Compeyron, won the award for best screenplay at the Durban International Film Festival in 2015.
Shot in the spaces of actual construction sites beyond the beaches in Mauritius, Lonbraz Kann explores a place where emotions are sparsely verbalized. Characters sit quietly together in grim waiting rooms, contemplating hillsides, sharing cigarettes, and waiting for managers. Silence does not mean lack of communication, however; much can be read in the characters’ gestures and in the symbolism of the scenes. In one scene, for example, workers are seated under heads of stuffed game. One man turns his chair in a different direction, perhaps to refuse the set-up. Poor working conditions in the new environment are underscored as the mortally wounded body of a Chinese laborer is unceremoniously taken away on a wheelbarrow. Amid long moments of silence, some lively conversations do take place, particularly at a modest boutique run by Ah-Yan, a friendly Chinese shopkeeper who, despite his wife’s complaints, allows the unemployed men to take home merchandise on credit.
According to the website for the film (http://eli357.wix.com/lonbrazkann), it depicts “a society caught in the web of time with the global intruding in the individual life. Set on an Indian Ocean island trailing its cliché of paradise, Lonbraz Kann shows the other side of the obstinate postcard of happy tropical people. . . .” The film can be read as an extension of Constantin’s briefer contemplation of globalization in his 2009 short film Made in Mauritius, whose title references the Mauritius Sugar Syndicate’s “label of quality for special sugars.” What is particularly significant in Lonbraz Kann is its portrayal of an economic system that pits unemployed locals against temporary laborers recruited from overseas. The film’s depiction of local middle managers whose salaries, homes, and cars are rewards for their ability to get workers to work harder and to accept losses is especially effective. The hierarchical relationships between French bosses and these local managers (Monsieur Labonne and Monsieur Dandev) often mirror the hierarchy established between the managers and laborers.
Through its characters, the film explores various dimensions of economic exploitation and its aftermaths in Mauritius and beyond. The usually absent French director of the sugar mill shows up to issue a speech to workers from above, vaguely calling upon the unemployed to “move forward” and “make concessions,” and then rushes off in his car after silencing protests. Monsieur Dandev, who is similarly threatened and managed by his French boss, is charged with posting demolition announcements and managing the laborers (and is seen dashing off in a smaller car). Monsieur Labonne, charged with handling complaints, tells those who protest that they need to make an appointment, makes them wait, and leaves in a rush before meeting anyone for more than a minute. Those responsible for the closing are rarely if ever present, and leave it to managers (who claim “we’re doing our best for you”) to handle the unpleasantness. Generosity as a practice is discouraged; profits are essential.
The days in which workers protested collectively seem to be over. Leponz, the film’s rebel, is unsuccessful in his attempts to convince his “comrades” to act, and eventually succumbs to financial pressure. Rosario responds to the crisis creatively: he takes scraps from the mill to fashion a new business, the “Otentik Boutik,” which sells “authentic” souvenirs to tourists passing by on buses. Yet the products are mostly “gadgets made in China,” and comically played tourists visit the “Boutik” only to take pictures of themselves with the locals. The new Chinese workers do not get many lines in the film, but their predicament is treated sympathetically. These characters are the most interesting, though they are not top billed. The main characters are Bissoon, the elder, who risks losing the small plot of land he was given in exchange for his labor. He is attached to the soil of his birthplace, and we see him caressing the earth and running his fingers through the dirt to reinforce his connection to the land. The soil serves here as a kind of conduit between Bissoon, his buried umbilical cord, and Mother Earth. Marco, the protagonist whose travels guide the film, is a quiet man with a mysterious past.
The characters who fare the worst are women, even as their portrayal in the film is less than inspiring. Marco’s interactions with his pretty new neighbor Devi, Dandev’s maltreated, illiterate wife, consist primarily of scenes in which Marco stares at her. Ah-Yan’s wife is an annoying heckler of her husband. The trope of the land as a woman is expanded as Marco and Bissoon gaze at the hills and Marco asks if Bissoon can see the shape of a naked woman in the curves. These hills, which are showcased in several scenes, recall the drawing of Sheba’s breasts on the map used by Allan Quatermain to locate diamonds in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885). They also bring to mind the trope of the feminine “lay of the land” so memorably investigated by Anne McClintock in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995). Of the woman drawn on the new billboard, one character jokes, “I hope she’s included in the price!”
During a Q & A session at the Durban Festival, Constantin remarked that the film depicts a chauvinism that unfortunately still exists. Whether the film’s landscapes participate in the territory-as-seductive-woman trope, or whether the chauvinism is a projection of the characters’ visions, is a matter of interpretation. In either case, Lonbraz Kann’s meditation on the contemporary politics of neoliberalism, globalization, and migration in Mauritius is worth a serious look.
