Rent Xala (1975)

Limp Authority - Xala review by griggs

There’s something almost cruel about opening a film on erectile dysfunction and ending up with the sharpest political gut-punch.

Impotence as a metaphor for a rotten new elite sounds like a hard sell, but Ousmane Sembène pulls it off with a straight face and a wicked sense of timing. El Hadji, a Senegalese businessman marrying his third wife, is cursed on his wedding night and can’t perform—professionally or otherwise, as it turns out. His authority goes limp along with everything else.

The boardroom scenes are where the knives really come out: French suits, French language, until one man switches to Wolof and gets shut down cold. Then, cornered and desperate, El Hadji rounds on his fellow businessmen, calls the whole lot of them witch doctors, and whips out his own talisman on the way out the door—the world’s least convincing exit line. He’s replaced by a pickpocket, which feels less like a twist than the film finally saying the quiet part out loud.

I’m still turning that swap over in my head. Funny, vicious, and thoroughly pleased with itself.