Around tea, we build a love story. Through the latter, we construct the discourse of a humanity which is encounters. Love, encounters, humanity, Abderrahmane Sissako’s “Black Tea” is drunk while thinking “of sweet perspectives”
By Moussa Seck –
Pathé turns off its lights and one of its enormous screens broadcasts. “The film you are about to see was born under a lucky star.” Signed Arte. Guaranteed success? The future will answer this question. For today, October 5, 2024, let’s follow… First images, a wedding. No stars in the eyes of those supposed to unite. White, the wedding dress. Dark, the mood of the bride-to-be. “I don’t want to live my future in lies and bitterness.” Toussaint and Aya are not Romeo and Juliet. “I say no”: Aya left. The lady in white runs down the alleys. Music accompanies it. Eyes and tongues roll over her. No one hears what is said about her. Abderrahmane Sissako’s teams masked the gossip with music. To mark the transition. Freed, Aya. Liberation music lyrics: “It’s a new life for me. And I’m feeling good.” Happiness in another language, springs from another continent. The black Aya is projected in Asia, in a country of tea. And it is at Xi Jinping’s house (this information may be false) that Black Tea, Mr. Sissako’s new film, is playing.
Black Tea is a world film, a film of the World, a film where worlds merge to give birth to a singular universe. We trade in Arabic, there is dialogue in Mandarin. They sing in the Cape Verdean language and dance to Afrobeat. A tailor from China (this information may be false) works with wax there. And in “this neighborhood” of this distant Asia, we eat, at Chez Ambroise, aloco and athiéké on a table garnished with bissap juice. Bissap, red leaves, tea, green leaves. Tea ? “Tea and the Art of Tea” taught to Aya by Wang Cai. An art concerned with detail where you have to know how to place your knuckle, to the millimeter, on a specific part of the teapot. An art that requires you to have control over your breathing. An art of smell and touch. A love of tea… Black and tea, explanations from Mr. Sissako: “I first wanted to show that Aya is interested in others, in the culture of others. She wants to build something.” She even dreams of a tea space in her home country. “I wanted to show that she was capable of embracing other people’s cultures.” Reaching out to others, embracing their culture, according to Abderrahmane Sissako, is a strength and not a weakness.
A modest love
Black Tea is the story of a love built around tea. Spoiler: you won’t find any big Hollywood declarations there, either, of extremely ritualized French-style romance. No public statement. No pompous pink. There are tea leaves that drape a love, removed one by one, with glances in the shop, with modest touches in the cellar where the art of tea is learned. This, with the complicity of an almost constant night which envelopes this modesty in the secret of its obscurity. We let ourselves be held hands by Abderrahmane Sissako who, after a long night phase, lets Wang Cai say that “black tea has a luminous taste”, to make Aya understand that she is the most luminous of tastes. . Statement decor: the greenery of a tea field. And there is a butterfly as the third character. Doesn’t the butterfly go through several stages of metamorphosis before becoming this being of color and beauty that we know? Perhaps there, a symbol of this love built in modesty, with several stages and which is finally declared in broad daylight. There, whoever wants to could hear that it is an artistic choice, to construct a modest love underground at night before exposing it to the day…The cellar was, says Abderrahmane Sissako, to “give these two people a form of intimacy, to know each other, to get closer little by little and for the touch to happen because that’s important. It’s a cinema that doesn’t show that people kiss and that that’s love. That’s not it. There is respect for others, there is a quest for something before embarking on a much more complex adventure which is to get married.
“China didn’t want this film…”
But, if Black Tea is 90% a nocturnal film, it’s because Abderrahmane and his teams had to get around a constraint. Indeed, “China did not want this film because it felt, without saying or mentioning it, that the main Chinese character does not represent Chinese values, because he is with an African woman. It is extremely serious when such a strong country moves in this direction,” Mr. Sissako revealed at a press conference. But, “you cannot tie the arms of an artist”. Solution: “I went to Taiwan, because it’s China, it’s the same language and so on”, even if a dimensional difference appeared. “And so, when we face a reality, that’s the strength and magic of cinema, we have to adapt. To adapt to the location, to my location, I decided to make the film at night. That’s the reason. The script didn’t say that. The scenario took place during the day and at night allowed me to create intimacy, to be intimate, not to go in that direction, where I really showed the almost documentary side with Guangzhou, a city of ‘Very busy Africans’.
Li-Ben, Bluetooth generation
The China of rejection in the film is undoubtedly this old man who compares the black people of “this neighborhood”, which he wants his grandson to leave, to animals. The grandson belongs to today’s world. “This Silk Road, for me, has no meaning if it doesn’t bring people together,” Li-Ben said to the old man. The sentence is important in the eyes of the director who repeats it at a press conference. Silk Road in the film, and in the press questions to Sissako. “Africa must not be an economic terrain for others to just take things. We have suffered from this for a long time and we are seeking to change that,” he challenges. Before demonstrating this great lucidity: “China can be lucky, it can also be bad luck. It’s up to us to position ourselves. It is up to us to transform this Silk Road, which is an economic route, into a truly route of human encounters.” It must be so, “because we have to give to humanity, we have given, we are giving to humanity”. Senghorien, this Sissako, who says that “not only are we capable of giving, but also of taking. And this dynamic, this vision of the continent, I think it’s very important.”
The ideas of Bluetooth, of a connection between these specificities which make a world will be evoked by Wang Cai’s son. They also reflect Abderrahmane Sissako’s idea that “humanity, in any case, is only an encounter”. Fear, ignorance, rejection of others (the director prefers not to talk about racism) can unfortunately arise from his encounters. And, “the artist must touch on these subjects and show them if he can”. Drinking lots of cups of Black Tea might help cultivate Li-Ben’s idea of Bluetooth. Drink “with sweet perspectives”, as advised by this French character whose existence we only know via an anecdote told by the ex-wife of Wang Cai
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