The team behind the Angolan production Air Conditioning, which was well-received internationally, is back on the festival circuit with Our Lady of the Chinese Shop, premiering at the Locarno Film Festival. Producer Jorge Cohen is responsible for both films and Ery Claver, who co-wrote Air Conditioning, is the writer and director of the current film.
Our Lady of the Chinese Shop tells overlapping and non-chronological stories across chapters. There is a couple consisting of a seriously ill man, Bessa (David Caracol), and his grieving wife, Domingas (Claudia Pucuta). There is a young man who had loved their daughter; there’s his father, Man Pelle (a well-cast Divino Salvador). There is a young man with violence on his mind wandering Luanda, Angola’s capital city and the setting of these stories. There is a Chinese merchant whose business is one of the fulcrums of the plot. And there is a Chinese narrator who speaks in a mixture of poetry and anthropology about Angolan society—although each of the subplots and each of the film’s characters, in their own way, make a statement about the country.
At this point, a warning is fair: the politics of Claver’s film is complex but relatively easy to grasp; it’s hard to say the same for the synopsis, especially as key information is withheld until very late. This probably means that while Our Lady of the Chinese Shop might attract a larger audience than Air Conditioning, members of that audience will have to be attentive and willing to sit through the film’s rather dry and obscure opening moments. If the idea is for the visuals to, at first, reflect the drudgery in Domingas’s chores and the sickly immobility of Bessa, it does that, but it’s a choice that keeps the viewer at arm’s length.
As expected from a film with that title and set in an African country, Our Lady of the Chinese Shop has as its underlying theme a mixture of politics, capitalism, and power. Some of these themes are hardly hidden. There is, for instance, a scene in which Man Pelle prays to his figurine of Our Lady, asking for “more power than the Chinese”. Speaking to his heartbroken son, he says, as he cleans the figurine, “Now that’s a real woman, one that doesn’t give you any trouble.”
In today’s Africa, the import of the first statement cannot be clearer. Several countries across the continent are indebted to China, which is common enough around the world, but has an implication that may not be replicated anywhere else: there is a chance that the debt will remain over generations. There are also more immediate concerns. China built the African Union headquarters, which was weird enough until there came reports that the building had been bugged.
So, when a character in a film as politically charged as this one says he wants Chinese power, what is being demanded is an outsized version of power. Claver never shows the endpoint of the request, but his point is made already by the expression of the demand.
You get the sense that Claver knows exactly what he wants to say and has the team to say that. But at moments during his first feature as a director, it feels as though he is speaking to himself. By the end, it appears Claver has invited all the elements of his story for an embrace in clarity—and yet, you are likely to leave Our Lady thinking that not all of those elements accepted his invitation.
Director, Screenplay: Ery Claver
Cast: Cláudia Pucuta, David Caracol, Willi Ribeiro
Producer: Jorge Cohen
Executive producer: Jorge Cohen, Sílvio Nascimento, Elias Ribeiro
Cinematography: Ery Claver, Eduardo Kropotkine
Editor: Zeno Monyak
Sound: Oswald Juliana
Sound design: Gernot Furhman
Music: Ismael Suama
Production Company: Geração 80
Venue: Locarno Film Festival
In Portuguese and Chinese
98 minutes