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When we first meet Shula (Susan Ciardi), the quiet, unwavering protagonist of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, she’s returning home from a costume party wearing sunglasses, a shiny metal helmet, and a voluminous black jumpsuit—which resembles an inflated trash bag—that envelops her from the neck down. Some see this look as an homage to Missy Elliott, particularly the music video for her 1997 debut solo single, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)”; others might wonder if, with her baggy, birdlike posture, Shula has already become a guinea fowl. Either way, there’s something oddly unsettling about the way Shula appears to us as camouflaged and protected, as if she’s guarding the truth of who she is. Ciardi’s subtle, attentive performance is key to creating this effect, which becomes the core of the plot. In each scene, Shula says little, but in every frame her calm is permeated with obvious anxiety, as if her apparent calm requires an enormous effort of will.
It’s late at night, but something catches Shula’s attention, causing her to stop, get out of the car, and investigate. There’s a dead man lying in the road, and it’s immediately obvious that she’s stopped not out of curiosity or concern but out of recognition. The body, of course, is that of her fifty-something uncle Fred (Roy Csisza), a fact she notes without sadness or shock, indeed, with a certain deadpan detachment. How could Shula, on a dark street in the dead of night, see a nondescript body on its back and intuitively know who it was? The answer is soon revealed: Fred was a serial sex offender. This turns out to be something of an open secret in Shula’s large, middle-class family, though it doesn’t seem to be serious enough to stop the mourning they’ve yet to experience. Becoming Guinea Fowl was written and directed by Rungano Nyoni, a Zambian-born British filmmaker whose family moved to Wales when she was a child. This is her second feature, and it is tense, immersive and, at ninety-nine minutes, brutally brief. But what it shows, over several days and nights of funeral rites, is a stunning test of endurance in which Shula is tasked with honoring the humiliated.
Shula grew up in Zambia but has only recently returned after a long absence. Nyoni’s film is thus the story of an extraordinarily painful homecoming, full of horrific memories. Shula was abused by Fred as a child; so too was her cousin Nsansa (a husky Elizabeth Chisela), who is as wild and exuberant as Shula is cautious and stern. When Nsansa, drunk, recalls Fred taking her to the lodge all those years ago, she does so with a mocking giggle, ridiculing his genitals and implying that he could hardly have abused her; only later, sober, does she admit to the grisly, more banal reality of what happened. A younger cousin, Bupe (Esther Sinjini), shares her own long-buried story of abuse in a harrowing mobile phone video, only part of which we see and hear; Later, in a striking formal fusion, Bupe's words overlap and merge with Shula's own. It is significant not only that the cousins share a painful experience, but also that individual testimony has collective power. One woman, in speaking, can express the feelings of others.
If Becoming Guinea Fowl were intended solely as a drama about untethered memories, unhealed trauma, and broken responsibility, it would leave a deep impression. But Nyoni goes further. It’s no coincidence that Shula shares her real name with the protagonist of the director’s powerful first film, I Am Not a Witch (2017). In that film, Shula is a teenager accused of witchcraft and sent to a remote “witch camp,” where she and other women are abused, exploited, and put on display for tourists like zoo animals or carnival freaks. Both films were shot by the distinguished cinematographer David Gallego, and in both he creates a particular tension in the frames that draws crowds. In Becoming Guinea Fowl, the precious, wrenching intimacies that Shula shares with her cousins are inexorably suppressed by social obligations and funeral concerns; they are suppressed almost before they can take meaningful root. Amid the stress of grief, young women have no real time to grieve for themselves.
Nyoni presents the preparations and rituals with an observant rigor that compels us to pay attention. It is a striking spectacle. Relatives descend en masse on Shula’s family home, now a temporary “funeral home”; furniture is removed and mattresses are brought for the women to sleep indoors while the men camp outside. This gender segregation is ever-present;
Sourse: newyorker.com
