MANDABI Movie Review

The Money Order
Le Mandat

Unlocking—perhaps for the first time on screen—the complex daily world of modern Africa, Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène's second feature was a bright burst of lightning on the world cinema scene. Mandabi (The Money Order) is a deceptively simple story of a man who receives a money order and runs straight into a barrage of bureaucracy—Third World bureaucracy, but bureaucracy nevertheless—when he attempts to cash it. Gradually but unmistakably gaining deeper and more far-reaching meaning as it progresses, Sembène's moving, witty, altogether masterful piece of storytelling is also a sharply etched portrait of a civilization in the throes of change. Thirty years after its initial release, Sembène's pioneering Mandabi remains fresh, exciting, warm, subtle, and heartbreaking—a seminal moment in the history of African cinema.

NEXT STOP … Black Girl, Emitai, Guelwaar

1968 90m/C Christoph Colomb, Makhouredia Gueye, lsseu Niang, Mustapha Ture; D: Ousmane Sembene. NYR