![]() ![]() For instance, quite a lot of time is spent learning about the anti-Derg resistance movement, which like all oppositional bodies has its own problems with infighting and debates over violent or nonviolent resistance. That local knowledge is one of the film’s strengths, even if it ultimately may dilute the project’s commercial potential. Instead, they accept - as quite likely would have been the case in real life at that time and in that place - that this a normal part of the local culture, one that the film’s director, Ethiopian Zeresenay Berhane Mehari ( Difret), knows himself from the inside. Western viewers are likely to be horrified that not only does this girl, who serves almost no other narrative function in the story, suffer such a terrible affliction, but also neither Lilly nor Aziz is particularly concerned about anything except the blood loss. This meet-cute over the unconscious body of a victim of FGM is but the first tricky chord in the film’s complex thematic tune, one that struggles to span the dynamics between different cultures within the story itself and those who might be watching the film from the outside. That’s where she meets handsome doctor Aziz Abdul Nasser (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, from Us and Aquaman), who, like Lilly, is not from Ethiopia originally and so struggles to be accepted by the locals. Instead, Lilly simply ensures the girl is taken to the local hospital for treatment. There’s no furious denunciation of her host when the woman’s own daughter starts bleeding profusely following a female circumcision. ![]() Deposited by one of the sheikh’s jealous wives, Gishta (the mesmeric Edelework Tassew), with her relative Nouria (Zeritu Kebede), in order to keep the exotic white girl out of the sheikh’s line of vision, meek and mild Lilly gets with the program and does what she’s told. Devout and obedient, she learns the Koran with such proficiency that she aims to become a religious teacher.īut for reasons that are never entirely clear, she’s sent to live with the family of a sheikh in Ethiopia just as the country is teetering, now that it’s the 1970s, on the brink of a civil war as the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie comes to an end and a Communist military junta, the Derg, ascends to power. She also fluently speaks Arabic and several North African languages. Back in the 1960s, little Lilly (played by Molly McCann in flashbacks) was abandoned by her skeevy Anglo-Irish hippie parents (Gavin Drea and Sophie Kennedy Clark) at a Sufi seminary in Morocco so they could go off and take more drugs unencumbered by childcare issues, and then be killed in a car accident for the sake of the plot.Īdopted and raised by a holy man, the Great Abdal (Estad Tewfik Yusuf Mohamed), Lilly adapts entirely to her environment, and once she becomes an adult wears modest dress according to local custom. It ticks nearly every box in the checklist of films you wish you could like more than you actually do.Ĭast, reportedly, after Saoirse Ronan bailed on the project, Fanning stars as Lilly Mitchell. ![]() For starters, the storytelling is often clumsy, the characterizations thin and other contributions trite (see, for example, the numbingly sappy musical score punching every emotional cue to pulp). Sadly, it doesn’t entirely connect emotionally for much more quotidian reasons. So they just went ahead and made a movie that’s laudably empathic, illuminating about a conflict barely discussed in the Western media, and which features some strong performances. Sweetness in the Belly plays like a film made by good, well-intentioned people who have already thought all of the above arguments through and still feel no closer to knowing how to balance commercial appeal, quality control and political correctness any better than the rest of us. That line of thinking, in turn, leads to withering retorts about defeatism, cynicism and the need to educate audiences, and so on and so on, rinse, repeat, ad nauseam, ad infinitum, etc. Which, of course, prompts pragmatists to cite how poorly many recent films, even critically acclaimed ones, anchored by black protagonists did in commercial terms unless the lead actor was already a huge star or it was a Marvel movie - and wouldn’t it be better to use any means necessary to get the message across? Then the opprobrium shifted to the sounder arena of denouncing that a story grounded in recent history about people of color, especially Africans, is seemingly assumed to only be palatable to mainstream audiences if it’s told through the eyes of a white person.
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