Screening Program - I'VE SEEN FILMS - International Film Festival

I’VE SEEN FILMS 2010
International Film Festival
Ramata
Ramata
FIlm notes
Ramata is the wife of a Senegalese high-ranked
official and, as such, living in a bourgeois
setting, where she should lead a sober life.
Instead, Ramata freely misbehaves and spends
thirty years of her marriage betraying him: a
contemporary Madame Bovary, almost.
However, her lover’s reasons differs from
Flaubert’s classic; reasons that, we will learn,
can be easily shared, but that Ramata will
discover too late.
‘Ramata’ is a very poetic film. Director,
Léandre-Alain Baker, describes the film as a praiseworthy psychological subtlety, a story of rebellion.
The central character is a liberated European woman in an African woman’s body. She lives without
any pain regarding the restrictions she is subject to, simply because she doesn’t care.
There is only one moment when her emancipation clashes with rules and ‘tradition’, and this is the
core of the film, from which Ramata’s personal drama ensues.
And while, little by little, Ramata fades away, the film colors also fade into shades of grey, in a
classic ‘winter-seaside-feel’ ending.
Ramata is played by the top model Katoucha Niane, a renowned African model also known for her
fight against infibulation, who died near her boathouse on the Seine River, under mysterious
circumstances, after shooting this movie.
This is a European story, and the protagonist could as well be a Michelangelo Antonioni or Antonio
Pietrangeli’s character. It’s an African story, but only because Senegal is its setting. The plot
development, the character outlines, the director’s choices, too, are all elements that make this film
a very enjoyable one. It is a story that could happen anywhere.
The only African peculiarity we find is the nature thematic. It overbearingly emerges, especially in
the film ending: the power of the nature scenes and of the sea overpowers everything and yet
gives everything back.
It is the power of the animist philosophy, that brings the nature elements to the foreground,
putting the sometimes- dangerous human ambitions into the right perspective.
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