Introducing her Zambian/British/Irish co-production On Becoming A Guinea Fowl to the attendant audience at Un Certain Regard at Cannes, writer/director Rungano Nyoni confessed to being teary-eyed when she realized it was the first film from Zambia to play at the festival. The honour is a welcome one, but the remarkable thing about her sophomore feature is the fine line it walks between universality and peculiarity. The film achieves a mood that’s at once calm and foreboding, which is appropriate considering it centres around a funeral. We’re all haunted by the dead at such occasions but, as Nyoni’s film shows, family comes together to exorcise those demons. The dead may not possess us, but they can be very malevolent.
The film balances the familiar and the weird from the very first scene, as Shula (Susan Chardy) drives home from a party, but stops when she finds the body of her uncle lying on the road. This is strange enough, but then Shula calls her father to alert him of her discovery, but does so with a dispassion bordering on contempt. To be fair, she’s being hounded by her drunken cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) while on the phone, but there’s clearly something deeper going on at this moment. Answers will come to the fore over the ninety minutes that follow, but from the start Chardy guarantees your investment with a performance of understated intensity. Beneath that steely exterior, emotions bubble away.
As word spreads of uncle’s passing, funeral preparations begin. Close family members begin the mourning process, but the cousin’s generation seems more distant. Nyoni frames the action in the familiar context of having to mourn someone you might have been too distant from to even know. The dialogue switches between English and Bemba, but the rhythms of social practice and familial placation are universal. Collect a family member from the airport, update your aunts on your studies, top up Grandpa’s glass. Nyoni knows her audience has gone through this process, and cleverly invites them to remember those experiences. DoP David Gallego’s navy nighttime scenes evoke those sleep-deprived periods masterfully.
As the mourning period continues, it becomes clear there’s more at play here. On Becoming A Guinea Fowl is an exploration of the past by way of character study. Shula, Nsansa and their younger cousin Bupe (Esther Singini) are affected by their uncle’s death, but manifest their feelings very differently. To say more would spoil the film’s later developments, but it does require the three actresses to produce very different and compelling characters, and all do so brilliantly. Chisela is a frequent scene-stealer in moments of dark comedy, while young Singini adds poignancy to a film already committed to bringing its characters to vivid life.
The film builds to the conclusion of the mourning process but, despite the performances and solid production values, the process is slow-burn to a fault. On Becoming A Guinea Fowl is a smidge over 90 minutes, but it does start to drag after family secrets are revealed and the film’s thematic concerns are spelled out. There’s nothing invalid in what it has to say, but it is a slight story with a relatively narrow focus, and it’s up to Chardy and her supporting cast to keep the film going to the end. They do, and On Becoming A Guinea Fowl emerges as a smart but personal film, one which Nyoni will likely brandish proudly as she goes on to bigger things. Unlike her characters, she will be able to look back at past events with fondness.
A release date for On Becoming A Guinea Fowl has yet to be confirmed.