Lingui (2021)

Low-key but hard-hitting abortion drama set in Chad - Lingui review by PD

The material realities of being a woman in the central African nation of Chad are expressed with profound sympathy in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s short and low-key but hard-hitting film. Eschewing the pat melodrama of victimhood and righteous triumph through suffering, the film depicts oppression as a constant struggle between pernicious forms of power and capable, resourceful women.

Amina is a single mother living in a Muslim community in N’Djamena. To get by, Amina takes the steel wires from old car tyres and weaves them into baskets. Haroun foregrounds the patient work that defines her day-to-day life, imbuing it with dignity by focusing on the precise, attentive detail that goes into everything from sharpening homemade knives to the plier-assisted winding of the wire around metal framework. Through her ingenious reworking of industrial products, Amina earns enough to support herself and her 15-year-old daughter, Maria, but even within this space that they’ve carved out for themselves they still face the barriers of social, economic, and religious power, Amina’s self-sufficiency quickly shown to clash with the expectations of religion, state, and community that she be little more than an extension of man (or God). The opening scene’s depiction of her crafting process is followed by a series of scenes in which men attempt to impose their control on her, notably local market bigwig Brahim, who has been trying to get Amina to marry him for some time, claiming, unlike other men in the village, to accept her as a single mother. Later, a local imam stops her, wanting to know why she’s isn’t attending prayers (there’s more than a little irony in the earlier shot of Amina rolling out a rug and praying outside the mosque, as women aren’t allowed inside.) Thus Haroun economically but effectively establishes the various constraints on Amina and Maria. When it’s revealed that Maria is pregnant and wants to have an abortion, Amina is initially furious, but when she reflects and considers that she doesn’t want Maria to face derision or hostility for being a single mother like herself, her position changes, a position that leads to her taking on the state, the local imam, and Brahim himself. The middle stretch of Lingui takes us, in a series of sobering steps, through the agonising, sometimes death-defying process of seeking an abortion in a place where it is at once the gravest sin and one of the oldest folk practices.

While he attunes the viewer to the everyday rhythms and practices of life for lower-class women, Haroun doesn’t entirely work in the register of realism - episodes like Amina and Maria inexplicably getting lost in a labyrinth of paths they walk every day make for memorable symbols of the difficult journey that the pair have been forced on to, although while Haroun’s imagery adeptly moves us from grounded reality to evocative metaphor, the storytelling doesn’t always seamlessly blend realism and contrivance - a development involving a conveniently wealthy blood relation in particular rather undermines the rooting of the story in the everyday world that Haroun establishes early on. Nevertheless, when the film's (both chilling and delicately hopeful) conclusion culminates effectively in a revelation whose seeds Haroun has been deftly planting throughout, the overall power of his plotting becomes evident. What we're left with is a film that pits the official, patriarchal community—hypocritical and inherently fractured—against the “sacred bonds” between women, and while the power between these sides remains plainly imbalanced, Lingui suggests that nobody’s been finally defeated. Impressive work.