Désiré Ecaré – Visages de femmes (1985)
Désiré Ecaré’s ”Faces of Women” is a technically rough, cheerfully rude, folkloric comedy about the status of women in the Ivory Coast, where Mr. Ecaré was born and raised. It is, in fact, two separate fables with a common frame, that of a street festival where the singing and dancing is nonstop.
In the first story, a bored wife is accused by her tyrannical farmer-husband of having an affair with his younger brother, a nattily dressed layabout. The wife isn’t, but would like to. At her wit’s end, she takes karate lessons in order to best her husband physically.
The highlight of the fable is a long erotic scene in which the layabout seduces the wife’s best friend as the young woman is bathing in the river. Aside from suggesting what the unhappy wife is missing, this sequence hasn’t much to do with the rest of the fable, but it’s beautifully photographed. Mr. Ecaré is as casual about the film’s narrative line as his characters are about the truth.
The second, much more poignant story is about Bernadette, a large, imposing though illiterate woman who supports her lazy husband, her Europeanized daughters and a large number of assorted relatives with her successful fish-smoking business.
Bernadette, who has 200 employees, would like to open a small restaurant in Abidjan, more or less for the fun of it, and goes to the bank to take out a loan. To her shock she finds that she can’t. She has no assets, nothing that would be acceptable as collateral. Her business, she’s told, is all cash-flow, a concept she doesn’t comprehend. Everything she makes in profit is spent on luxuries by her hangers-on. Says her husband piously, ”Women aren’t meant to understand such things.”
With the help of her eldest daughter, a very pretty, sharp-tongued, elegantly dressed young woman, Bernadette takes her first steps toward liberation. If she has her way, her favorite niece will become a cadet at St. Cyr. Eugénie Cissé-Roland, who plays Bernadette, has a sort of grandeur about her that’s also genuinely funny.
”Faces of Women” is the first feature by Mr. Ecaré, who began shooting in 1973 and finished 12 years later. Made on a shoestring, with post-synchronized sound, ”Faces of Woman” is also a one-movie record of a film maker’s development. The style of the fable about Bernadette is far more sophisticated and subtle than the opening segment, which sometimes seems to be the film diary of a movie maker in search of a subject.
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9B0DEEDA173DF930A25751C0A961948260
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1h 50mn
Size: 1.65 GiB
Video
Codec: h264
Resolution: 696x478 ~> 696x522
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate:
BPP:
Audio
#1: AAC
https://nitro.download/view/DE28D677EBA7778/Visages_de_femmes.mkv
Language(s):French, Aidoukrou
Subtitles:English (hardcoded)
