Review of Our Lady of the Chinese Shop (2022)
Seen in 2023.
Seen with faulty subtitles at GIFF 2023. The Chinese narrator’s monologue, in particular, was poorly translated to English; the Portugese dialogue made more sense.
Having failed to cozy up to his unhinged government, an Angolan man named Bessa molests his daughter, leading to her tragic death. In a magical coincidence, Bessa’s roof develops a leak so severe that water comes pouring in when it isn’t even raining. Also, he falls ill. All of that happens before the movie opens, so that Bessa is near death with bronchitis when it does. He’s barely a speaking role. Some of the background is revealed in the belated prologue, which is co-titled 引子, meaning “primer” rather than prologue. It starts halfway through the movie. In an unrelated subplot, a street kid is looking for his dog and burns down a Chinese-owned shop of Christian icons so that Bessa is killed by an icon that bursts into flame through sympathetic magic.
An early scene shows plastic-wrapped bales of clothing, of the kind that gets sent to Angola by charities such as Abbé Pierre’s Emmaus, being unloaded. Later, in the prologue, empty clothes flap in the breeze on the bleechers of a stadium where the president makes a speech and then devours a banquet. The president never acknowledges the obvious fact that this crowd has no real people in it, nor that the parquet seating for real people in front of the stage is small and only half full at that, as revealed in a single ultra-wide shot.
That elaborate prologue is the only good part of the movie. It’s made in the style of Glauber Rocha, so much so that it seems to express a kind of nostalgia for Rocha’s iconoclastic late 1960s, when colonialism was a little more black and white. The rest of the movie, that is parts I and II before the prologue and the short part III after it, is more conventional and more clumsy.
There is symbolism in the way that the fake crowd, apparently manufactured from foreign aid (donated clothes), props up the president’s delusions, but the intent behind this symbolism is muddled. The street kid perhaps does the Right Thing, but it doesn’t seem constructive at all. The role of the Chinese is poorly characterized, at least in the bad subtitles I saw. Neither plot nor symbolism come together, and you can’t blame that on the budget.