Much has changed in the world over the past 10 years. A worsening environmental crisis has decimated the way of life for millions of people. Growing economic inequality and the seemingly unabatable proliferation of misinformation has seen the far right rise in popularity in the West. Conflicts and atrocities have arisen or intensified in areas such as Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Palestine. A worldwide pandemic has reconfigured the globe’s perspectives on health, travel, and life itself. And Chinese investment in Africa — categorized by some as a kind of neo-colonialism — has radically altered the shape and structure of life on the great continent: new opportunities, new challenges, and new connections. Where once many Africans may have ventured abroad to forge new lives in their present or former colonial overseers’ home territories in Europe, now many venture East instead to the bustling megacities of the new preeminent global power.
In times of change, uncertainty, and struggle — of which, for a great many, these undoubtedly are — some may turn to cinema for distraction, comfort, or even answers to the fundamental questions of their reality. And indeed, cinema can provide those things, typically if crafted with intelligence and sensitivity. But much has also changed in cinema in the past 10 years, and, it’s sad to say, one such change is this: Abderrahmane Sissako, a filmmaker of remarkable skill and sagacity, whose repertoire has been of unassailable quality to date, has regrettably made a bad film. Ten years ago, Timbuktu, arguably the crowning achievement of his career, opened to rapturous critical acclaim and a slew of prestigious awards. Fifteen months ago, Black Tea screened to critical befuddlement, with not a single prize to its name to date. It’s a sad fate for such a feverishly anticipated title, but it’s also a fair one.
Aya (Nina Melo) is an Ivorian living in Guangzhou, having left her fiancé at the altar in Côte d’Ivoire. She works at a tea shop owned by Cai (Han Chang), a man toward whom she harbors romantic affection, though his complicated relationship history threatens to disturb their fragile courtship. At least, that appears to be the case — it’s hard to tell, since Sissako shows apparently little interest in telling this simple story in a simple manner. In fact, he shows little interest in the story at all — Black Tea is a film composed of numerous brief scenes in single locations, usually with two or three characters among a cast of perhaps 20. Many appear only in a couple of such scenes, yet, in their fleeting few moments of screen time, they’re frequently treated as temporary protagonists, telling their own stories for an instant before receding or disappearing. In static, manicured shots, an ensemble of actors of varying degrees of ability is afforded scant time to relate evidently rich personal histories and desires through platitudinous declarations and strained exchanges.
Amidst all this, the central narrative thread of Aya and Cai is thus lost time and time again, though even those scenes devoted to developing this don’t quite work. Sissako seems to be pitching a mood rather than belaboring plot points, but the casual ellipses in detail and time give no foundation to the emotions required to underpin that mood. The style that he cultivates, which has certain objective merits, thus feels arch and posey, tethered less to any tangible narrative or character detail than to his artistic intentions, which are scarcely any more intelligible than what’s actually going on in any number of this film’s curious asides and escapades. These range from the substantial — precisely what occurred between Cai and his ex-wife Ying (Wu Ke Xi), for example, or whether the Cabo Verde trip was even real or not — to the ephemeral (though no less impactful in their obscurity) — a jarring, presumably imagined shot featuring Aya and Ying in the film’s painfully hokey climactic sequence. Flourishes like these should, in the hands of a master like Sissako, add depth of texture and breadth of perspective, yet their puzzling nature amongst such otherwise banal material only makes Black Tea feel like a questionable student film, the work of someone with disparate, overly ambitious ideas but no real idea how to weave these together into a single, satisfactory work of art.
The film’s list of other, more minor missteps is long, and ever-accruing up to its end — cumbersome anti-racist pronouncements devoid of nuance, elementary school-standard acting from several cast members, an intrusive, repetitive musical score straight out of a Hallmark weepie, a CGI butterfly to add the finishing touch of pure cringe to an already laughable scene of would-be romance. And, despite all its oddities, the film’s stateliness and its refusal to commit to proper development of any of its many stories make it a dull and difficult watch. So little of Black Tea works as it was surely intended to that one wonders, in those moments where Sissako displays some of the delicacy of style and tone that is his signature, if these displays aren’t just the wishful viewer being generous, or perhaps just happy accidents in a thoroughly wayward work. Turn to Black Tea for distraction, comfort, or answers of any kind, and be left wanting. There are no answers here, only the disappointing question of how a filmmaker as accomplished as Abderrahmane Sissako made a film as bad as this.
DIRECTOR: Abderrahmane Sissako; CAST: Nina Melo, Han Chang, Isabelle Kabano, Michael Chang; DISTRIBUTOR: Cohen Media Group; IN THEATERS: May 9; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 51 min.
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