The tension between showing the poverty-stained reality of how a large percentage of Africans live and the politics of its visual representation is probably never going to be resolved. Filmmakers seeking to showcase the first will either have to be alive to the second, or be reminded of it by reviewers.
That tension is in nearly every scene of Moumouni Sanou’s Night Nursery, which won the Best Documentary award at FESPACO this year. The nursery in the title refers to a house in Burkina Faso where children are left to be cared for because their mothers work mostly by night. Where are the fathers? Who knows. But knowing that these mothers are hookers might provide an answer to that question.
The premise of the documentary might suggest there’s something entrepreneurial about the old lady running the nursery. She is, after all, meeting a demand with her service. But whatever business acumen led to the establishment of the nursery isn’t really the focus of this documentary. Its interest is more the fly on the wall sort. The camera is there but not quite there. Only in one scene towards the end is the man behind the camera referred to. This passivity and apparent impartiality of Sanou’s lens allows the story, where there is one, to be conveyed by the activity and words of the subjects, which is quite good, given that nobody speaks for them. But it also means that structured storytelling isn’t quite attained, so that the documentary is a general exploration of the living conditions of the women and their relationship with the nursery that houses their children for many hours before dawn.
Naturally, there are tricky relationships. Or one tricky relationship, which helps the documentary to have some conflict. This conflict comes in the shape of a mother who leaves her child for over a year and then returns to face the angry caretaker. After an attempt to deny she’s been away so long, she concedes that she has behaved badly, but says she had gotten into trouble and insists she never forgot her child. “Why would I come back?” she asks as a retort to those who have accused her of absconding after dropping off her offspring. The child, a chubby-cheeked little girl, stays oblivious, eating a snack. To consider her future is to invite tragic thoughts.
Sanou clearly believes in showing his subjects’ warts and all, which is perhaps an admirable trait for a documentary maker. But it is not quite possible to watch Night Nursery and praise all that one sees, all that it shows. Sanou’s impartiality gives glimpses of dignity in certain moments that are obviously borne of poverty, as in one scene where a child is getting bathed in a metal basin. Something about the mother cleaning her child is endearing, and clearly not an activity restricted to one half of the class line. That tenderness, that palpable humanity, unfortunately doesn’t come through in every scene. Viewers of a certain sensibility will cringe at how breastfeeding is shown in a couple of scenes. In one, a mother pacifies her crying child as it sleeps on the floor of her apartment. It is an intimate moment between mother and child and it is being done in the informality of her home. Did it have to be shown in what looks like the most undignified manner possible? No. Does agreeing to be in a documentary while poor imply the forfeiture of one’s dignity? It shouldn’t.
The feeling of second-hand shame reaches its apogee, when, in the closing shot, two exhausted women cradling their babies are shown fast asleep, crumpled in the backseat of a car. The camera stays on their bodies as one baby suckles and then, much too active, leaves the mother’s breast exposed. Is this a scene that would exist if the mother was on the other side of the class line? It seems unlikely. And leaving that as the documentary’s parting shot, thus calling attention to it, recalls a popular Janet Malcolm remark about journalists: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”
Sanou is a director, not a journalist, but the line is apt, even if he is neither stupid nor, as far as I can tell, full of himself. One just wishes that his need to tell a true story with a superfluous level of detail didn’t overwhelm his sense of discretion at crucial moments.
Director: Moumouni Sanou
Cinematography: Pierre Laval
Editing: François Sculier
Sound Design: Ivan Broussegotte
Sound: Corneille Houssou
Producer: Berni Goldblat
Production: VraiVrai Films (France), Blinker Filmproduktion (Germany)
Duration: 67 minutes
