Critics reviews

It emerged as a freewheeling tragicomedy with a rambunctious sense of humour as a well as a spirit of commentary and satirical import that lands all the more sharply for its deceptively breezy disposition.

It is a dreamy lovers-on-the-run movie in which a wayward couple begs, borrows and steals for a ticket to France. It does not provide a direct route, instead using associational editing and lush, intense colors to create a vibe and atmosphere of escape. . . . Abandoning cinematic realism, Mambety instead opts for a warping of time in an editing scheme that emphasizes mood over lucidity.

Mambéty doesn't stint on depicting the practicalities—economic, political, religious, ceremonial, and even geographical—of life in Dakar, but he reveals their phantasmic implications. He does so by way of images that are both incisive and flamboyant, that join his documentary avidity to his imaginative flair.

Mambéty's stunning, unpredictable feature debut (tragically, he only directed one other: 1992's Hyenes) arguably prefigured the spirit of punk while simultaneously forging a radical new direction for sub-Saharan African cinema. Its cornucopia of stunning, sun-baked imagery, sonic dissonance and sharp political subtext renders it one greatest films of the 70s, and one of the best debuts of all-time.

Mambéty deals primarily in color, movement, and silent expressions of fervent desire; if he's sometimes a bit blunt with his metaphors—anyone squeamish about unsimulated depictions of animal slaughter, incidentally, should avoid not just Touki Bouki but this box set in general—that's a small price to pay for the giddy, stylish passion he invests in characters who might otherwise seem irredeemable.

Colourful, hypnotizing, and rebellious in both narrative and form, Mambéty's portrait of Senegal is nouvelle vague in feel (that has earned it comparisons to Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou) but retains a distinct, infectious rhythm.

While its narrative, concerning two young lovers who conspire to steal money in an effort at escaping their hometown of Dakar, is fairly familiar, its striking conceptualization, moving ably from feverish fantasy to stark reality via sharp editing and bold montage, remains invigorating and palpably passionate.

Of course, Mambety's film is fascinating for the way it harnesses many of francophone African cinema's traditional antinomies—the conflict between tradition and modernity, rural versus urban sensibilities, and the ravages of the colonialist inheritance that coexist with the corruption and bad faith of neocolonialism. But the film's singular accomplishment is its success in recasting and recontextualizing these motifs in a truly startling fashion.

Touki Bouki" is a rich, multivalent work, and also one with a deep vein of humor, with Mambéty approaching the material satirically as much as he does poetically.

Mambéty's nightmarish/playful "anti-realist" brashness finds its outlet in (of all things) a comedy, and one about a motorcycle-riding petty crook to boot, though everything seems to take on new and strange meanings through the bright colors and striking compositions of Georges Bracher's cinematography.