Emil, a middle-aged African comedian living in Paris and specializing in one-man shows, is caught in an existential vortex consisting of a diagnosis of stomach cancer, a careening career, and fractious relationships with three women: Elisa, a black woman who is the mother of his precocious nine-year-old, Akena; Fatima, a Maghrebi woman; and a French wife, Odile. Spanning three biblical realms of the afterlife—Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, and conceptually aligned with Dante’s epic poem, Divine Comedy—Aduaka adds an opening category, Birth, featuring Akena’s birthday celebration and a white balloon floating down a gentle, gurgling stream. Hell accentuates his debacles. Later, in Purgatory, a spectacular celestial body nestles on a dark theater screen, evoking a transcendental experience as Emil watches one of his performances involving trauma. His dead mother, Wintaka, a mythical figure, calls for humanity’s reclamation and an African renascence. In a brief denouement Emil strolls through a park with Akena before pointing at something off-screen: Paradise. The film ends with a solemn dedication: “Pour Fanon” (For Fanon).
With Emil as a character and subject, the film, which won the Critics Award in FESPACO 2013, involves introspection, quests for reconciliation and redemption, and a difficult subject, mortality. Like Dante’s masterpiece, it explores humanity and the poetic imagination. Hence Aduaka formulates eclectic aesthetic and narrative registers, suffused with symbols, themes, intertextual references, self-reflexive moments, and philosophical musings like “Si vis pacem, para bellum” (if you want peace, prepare for war); “You cannot run faster than time”; and “Freedom is not a destination.” Significantly, one-man show theatrical and performance traditions like pantomime, magic, music, spoken-word, and stand-up comedy are here conflated with melodrama, psychodrama, and the metaphysical.
The film’s many mirrors are not narcissistic or mere props. They expand the narrative space, literally and figuratively, and in playing on material realities, their reflections, subtleties, projections, and intrinsic capacities for distortion help create critical perspectives and nuances of meaning, even reflective distance, between the characters and spectator. Moreover, an evocative soundtrack, comprising jazz, piano, classical, fusion, and experimental music, complements the film’s conceptual foundations, filling in where words or actions are inadequate and providing soothing undercurrents and needful counterpoints.
The film’s man-at-crossroads-of-life underpinning is richly complemented by its sophisticated production values: a fragmented plot structure, captions, colors, pixilated images, esoteric chants, repetitive rambling dialogues, and hand-held camera work blur boundaries between documentary and fiction and convey an indifference to normative dramatic arcs and resolutions. In a confrontation with Emil, for instance, Odile speaks in English, irreverently quotes Ecclesiastes 3:1–8, faults cultural differences for their problems, and regrets her own choice of not having a child with him. Closing with a grainy, enigmatic, home-video clip of a carefree biracial boy playing in a leaf-strewn park, this scene bridges psychical and material worlds.
Relationships are central to Emil’s tribulations, not just in the intensity and range of emotions they elicit but in delineating characters, perspectives, and narrative trajectories. Thus the particularities of each relationship with Elisa, Fatima, and Odile generate complex networks of psychological and dramatic tensions, especially in relation to the quandaries and questions each pose to him. In this, silences, euphemisms, denials, facial expressions, and bodily movements constitute veritable markers of anxieties and repression around delicate topics, unsettled and unsettling issues related to Emil’s quest for atonement.
Frustrated and homeless, Emil suffers pain and shame from the strained relationship with Akena who, negotiating the stressful experiences of his parents’ contentious relationship, symbolizes innocence and vulnerability. After hearing a bedtime story, he asks perceptive questions about the difference between imagination and memory that befuddle Emil but underscore the film’s exploration of how those categories generate narratives, enhance meanings, and foster the reconfiguration of psychical realms. In posing debilitating challenges for Emil, particularly around fatherhood, affection, trust, duty, and moral responsibility, their inextricably intertwined fate is ingeniously symbolized, through an abiding journey motif, by the staff they hold together, approaching paradise.
For Emil, the theater is a cradle and crucible. The numerous production posters in his dressing room foreground creative diversity and offer archival value like the Africultures sticker elsewhere, drawing affinities between cultural production, Africa, and its diaspora. Pertinent, too, is Akena’s interest in African art and the description of a figurine as his “new teddy.” Emil’s books, notably, include Kafka’s classic, The Trial, which like the film engages humanistic issues, personal ordeals, and psychical anguish; and Frederick Forsyth’s The Biafra Story and Arthur Nwankwo and Samuel Ifejika’s The Making of a Nation: Biafra, which add layers of historical knowledge to Africa’s political crises. In the sequence involving Wintaka, he articulates his sense of origins, political sensibilities, psychical turmoil, and oral tradition as African narrative provenance.
The film is largely a coming-to-terms narrative and its dedication to Fanon, a psychiatrist, intellectual, and revolutionary, locates it firmly within a discursive framework where history, interracial desire, migration, exile, displacement, identity, and trauma are crucial anchors.
