Un transport en commun

SAINT LOUIS BLUES is set in Senegal, and turns out to be a mind-numbing exercise in whimsy. The French love this sort of thing (see: 8 WOMEN as a prime example), where people burst out in song or dance in a realistic setting, unlike the elaborate MGM musicals of old. But director Dyana Gaye delivers embarrassing amateurism.

The plot hook, meager as it is, concerns a group of travelers headed by cab to the town of Saint Louis, near Dakar. They share the fare, and later admit a seventh passenger (a Caucasian guy). In an extremely dubious interracial love-at-first-sight shtick, the white fellow is smitten with a hairdresser, who is trying to escape from her domineering aunt who owns the salon and is traveling separately on a parallel route.

Nothing much happens, except the untalented cast singing off-key and shuffling along in the most perfunctory of would-be dance steps, sashays and arm waving, that would have Alvin Ailey rolling in his grave. I name drop the legendary dancer and choreographer merely to contrast with real talent; when one watches folks like these clunking along without a clue, it is major groan-time.

The lyrics, written by the director, are banal in the extreme, and the film proves exceedingly pointless, even as a window onto another culture. I had seen many quality Ousmane Sembene films about Senegal throughout the 1970s when he was riding high on the film festival circuit, and this latter-day effort does not measure up to the high standards he set.

I caught this at a New York Public Library festival of African movies, and it was perhaps the weakest in the bunch.

I came across this short film as I was cataloging the DVD collection Africa First, volume 1, which includes this work. If you're looking for serious post-colonial deconstruction, this ain't it. If, on the other hand you are looking for light musical entertainment, perhaps it will surprise and delight you as it did me. Another commentator disparaged it as the sort of thing the French love, like that's a bad thing. The film it reminded me of most was Jacques Demy's 1967 film The Young Girls of Rochefort, which is sort of the less popular sister to his more melancholy film the Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Un transport en commun (a.k.a. Saint Louis Blues) is decidedly low budget and the plot is not compelling, but the characters do yearn and dream in a way that may be understandable, and while they are not virtuoso singers and dancers, that, too, may be relatable to people who move through their daily lives imagining a soundtrack that is the music of their souls.

This movie was recently shown at the New York City Public Library's African Film Festival which must be commended for including this wonderful, entertaining movie in the program. The music is outstanding, almost nonstop, superimposed on a story that is contemporary and straight forward. This movie is proof that elaborate sets and locations are not necessary to produce a high quality cinematic movie. What makes this movie so great are the actors whose performances are uniformly excellent. Their singing and dancing is topnotch and matches anything produced by Hollywood. The story is a like a mini-road movie set in Senegal. The ensemble cast do a wonderful job and is proof that quality of the entertainment is not necessarily a function of the size of the budget. After watching this movie one will be impressed with the dancing and singing skills of the actors and the depth of their performances which cover a wide gamut of emotions. What a wonderful movie.