DVD of the Week: “Moolaadé”

The ending of the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene’s last film, “Moolaadé,” from 2004 (which I discuss in this clip) is so good that it would be a shame to give it away. But the ending makes clear that the political clarity and complexity, the historical insight, the command of custom and law that marked his four-decade filmmaking career was also graced by the ability to make decisive, symbolic moments. Sembene’s first feature, “Black Girl,” from 1966, depicts a young woman from Senegal who emigrates to France in the expectation of a better life but doesn’t find it. He ingeniously amplifies the drama with allusions to French New Wave classics, suggesting the indissociabilty of France’s artistic treasures and its racial politics. In “Moolaadé,” set in a village in Burkina Faso—about one woman’s resistance to the long-standing practice of female genital mutilation and the uproar in the village as that resistance attracts followers—the context is the intersection of local tradition and Islam, and the effect on religious practice and cultural heritage when faced with technological modernity. Here, too, the French colonial legacy plays an important part in the story, and Sembene embodies it with his dramatic conception as well as his directorial invention. The ingenuity of the ending is its encapsulation of grand currents of history in a majestic yet deft, brisk but profound touch. It’s one of the great last shots of a directorial career.