Do you want someone to whisper into your ear or yell? In most cases, you’ll answer the former, but if the decibel level is at the point where you can barely hear––and might even be losing interest in what’s being said––you’ll reconsider. This is a succinct way of describing Black Tea, which maintains so low a tempo while having such an inevitable conclusion that you wonder what the intention, exactly, might’ve been.
With Abderrahmane Sissako moving at what now seems like one film a decade, this return is even more of a disappointment. A director who has compellingly rendered the slow-moving tragedies of Mali and Mauritania in past films, he’s a vital voice in cinema. Black Tea finds him trying to render something that, from the outset, has the appearance of a classical romantic melodrama. A western viewer ascribing traditional demands to Sissako’s cinema is, for a number of reasons, likely wrongheaded, but one still feels something lodged too awkwardly between two worlds of film from it––something neither rapturous nor penetrating.
We meet Aya (Nina Melo) on her wedding day, in a public ceremony to what seems to be the town’s mayor. From the small amount of time we have, it’s apparent he’s rather controlling. When it comes time to say “I do,” she boldly absconds. Cut to later, and she’s fled the Ivory Coast for a new life in Guangzhou, China, living amongst the city’s African diaspora. She soon comes into contact with Cai (Chang Han), a middle-aged Chinese man who owns the tea shop she works in. A romance between the two blooms, with each finding more in common than they thought.
Despite their equally kind and soft-spoken nature, some tension still emerges as to whether their romance can survive racial and class differences that would naturally tear them apart. But “tension” maybe isn’t the right word to describe the proceedings of Black Tea, which is as quiet as its characters. Despite spreading to an ensemble including Aya’s co-workers and Cai’s family, where we can see the points of view of people potentially oppressing their love, nothing seems to spike the proceedings too much. Again, an issue seems to be that Aya’s self-determination is a little too clearly a cyclical structure that the film is setting up.
Sissako’s talent is always apparent, be it the elegant crossfades, his ability to capture the smallest gestures of his actors, or the simplest talents of knowing where to place the camera––nobody would accuse him of slacking on that front. But it feels like he’s working towards such a narrative dead-end that whatever skill is on display doesn’t necessarily create a second meaning of sorts. It seems, at the end of the day, that the film is afraid to be a melodrama, almost as if displaying the timidity of its characters. One might think he spent a decade building up more anger.
Black Tea opens in theaters on Friday, May 9.
The post Black Tea Review: Abderrahmane Sissako Crafts a Low-Tempo Romance first appeared on The Film Stage.
