The Resounding Silences of “On Changing into a Guinea Fowl”

Once we first meet Shula (Susan Chardy), the quietly unbending protagonist of “On Changing into a Guinea Fowl,” she is driving house from a fancy-dress get together, carrying darkish shades, a gleaming metallic helmet, and a puffy black jumpsuit—it seems to be like an inflated trash bag—that engulfs her from the neck down. Some will acknowledge the look as an homage to Missy Elliott, particularly the music video for her 1997 solo-single début, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)”; others could surprise if Shula, along with her dishevelled, birdlike carriage, has already change into a guinea fowl. Both method, there’s something oddly disquieting about the best way Shula involves us each disguised and armored, as if she had been guarding the reality of who she is. Chardy’s watchful, fine-grained efficiency is essential to this impact, and it seems to be the important thing to the film. In scene after scene, Shula doesn’t say a lot, however there may be, in virtually each body, an unmistakable nervousness in her composure, as if her mere look of calm required a significant exertion of will.

It’s late at evening, however one thing Shula sees compels her to cease driving, get out of her automobile, and examine. A person lies useless within the street, and it’s instantly obvious that she paused not out of curiosity or concern, however recognition. Positive sufficient, the physique belongs to her fiftysomething uncle Fred (Roy Chisha), a undeniable fact that she registers with no disappointment or shock, and, certainly, with a sure deadpan detachment. How might Shula, on a dim avenue in the dark, have laid eyes on a supine, nondescript physique and realized, in her intestine, precisely who it was? The reply is quickly revealed: Fred was a serial sexual predator. This seems to be one thing of an open secret inside Shula’s massive, middle-class household, though it’s not, apparently, a sufficiently critical one to halt the gauntlet of mourning that lies forward. “On Changing into a Guinea Fowl” was written and directed by Rungano Nyoni, a Zambian-born British filmmaker, whose household moved to Wales when she was a toddler. Her second function, it’s taut, absorbing, and, at ninety-nine minutes, ruthlessly concise. However what it bears witness to, over a number of days and nights of funeral rites, is a staggering endurance take a look at, wherein Shula is tasked with honoring the dishonorable.

Shula grew up right here, in Zambia, however she has solely not too long ago returned, after a while away. Nyoni’s movie is thus the story of an unusually pained homecoming, of horrible recollections confronted. Shula was abused by Fred as a toddler; so was her cousin Nsansa (a raucous Elizabeth Chisela), who’s as irrepressible and exuberant as Shula is cautious and stern. When Nsansa drunkenly recounts the time Fred took her to a lodge years earlier, she does so with irreverent cackles, mocking his genitalia and implying that he was barely able to violating her; solely later, after sobering up, does she confess the horrible, extra banal actuality of what occurred. A youthful cousin, Bupe (Esther Singini), tells her personal long-buried story of abuse in a heartbreaking cell-phone video, solely a part of which we see and listen to; later, in a startling formal elision, Bupe’s phrases overlap and merge with Shula’s personal. The purpose will not be merely that the cousins share a painful expertise however that particular person testimony has a collective energy. One girl, in talking out, can communicate for others as effectively.

Had “On Changing into a Guinea Fowl” been conceived purely as a drama of unearthed recollections, unhealed trauma, and thwarted accountability, it could lower to the bone. However Nyoni goes additional nonetheless. It’s no coincidence that Shula shares her given identify with the younger protagonist of the director’s highly effective first function, “I Am Not a Witch” (2017). The Shula in that film is an adolescent woman who’s accused of witchcraft and exiled to a distant “witch camp,” the place she and different imprisoned girls are mistreated, exploited, and placed on show for vacationers, like zoo creatures or carnival freaks. Each movies had been shot by the very good cinematographer David Gallego, and in each he invests pictures of gathered crowds with a peculiarly transfixing stress. In “On Changing into a Guinea Fowl,” the valuable, anguished intimacies that Shula exchanges along with her cousins are relentlessly pressurized by the social obligations and anxieties of the funeral; they’re choked off nearly earlier than they will start to take significant root. Amid the busy work of grief, the younger girls haven’t any actual time to grieve for themselves.

Nyoni movies the preparations and rituals with an observational rigor that sharpens our personal focus. It’s an astonishing spectacle to behold. Family members descend en masse on Shula’s household house, which is now briefly a “funeral home”; furnishings is cleared away, and mattresses are introduced in for the ladies, who sleep indoors, whereas the lads arrange camp outdoors. Such gender segregation is a continuing; it falls to the ladies of the home to make the preparations, purchase meals, and prepare dinner meals. Amid energy outages (a nod to Zambia’s power disaster) and surprising floods, a complete equipment of mourning kicks into gear, and Shula and her cousins are amongst its busiest cogs. In a single casually infuriating sequence, Shula searches desperately for Bupe, gravely involved about her well-being, solely to be repeatedly distracted by older male family who demand that she serve them meals. Additional affirming the final uselessness of the male intercourse is Shula’s father (Henry B. J. Phiri), who by no means misses a possibility to hit his daughter up for cash and turns a largely deaf ear to any phrase of Fred’s trespasses.

The older girls in Shula’s household, regardless of superficial gestures of assist and compassion, don’t show significantly better. Shula is all however bullied into submission by her aunts, who scold her for having bathed—one thing strictly forbidden till the mourning interval is over—and demand to know why she stays dry-eyed within the wake of her uncle’s loss of life. In these moments, “On Changing into a Guinea Fowl” achieves a startling panorama of cross-generational alienation, wherein Fred’s abuses are proven to have destroyed any significant connection between moms and daughters, aunts and nieces. Remarkably, Nyoni and Gallego convey this rupture nearly solely by compositional emphasis. Within the early mourning scenes, they use digicam placement to strategically conceal the older girls’s faces and identities, decreasing them to an undifferentiated blur of weeping and wailing. Juxtaposed with a lot performative distress, Shula’s unwavering serenity takes on a steely ethical readability, throwing the absurdity of the entire charade into stark aid. Even when Shula’s determine is partially obscured, or filmed from behind, we will usually inform from the set of her shoulders—Chardy’s clenched physique language is grimly eloquent—exactly what she is pondering and feeling.

One of many movie’s most tragic figures is Fred’s meek and traumatized younger widow (Norah Mwansa), who’s handled abominably by Shula’s aunts. They accuse her of driving Fred to his loss of life by irresponsibility and neglect, they usually try and weaponize this accusation financially, denying her and her family any declare to Fred’s property. In actuality, the circumstances of Fred’s loss of life appear neither ambiguous nor suspicious. It’s implied that he expired at a brothel, possible mid-coitus, not removed from the street the place his physique was discovered. Nyoni might have performed “On Changing into a Guinea Fowl” as a homicide thriller, a funeral-parlor whodunit; definitely there isn’t any scarcity of suspects or motives the place the loathsome Fred is worried. However there are actually solely two mysteries at play right here: how will Shula and her cousins, amid a lot pretense, convey the reality to gentle? And what does that must do with the movie’s eccentric, unforgettable title?

The 2 solutions are deeply and imaginatively intertwined, and the peculiar significance of the guinea fowl could be discovered, like the injuries and scars of abuse themselves, deep within the mists of reminiscence. The eerily thrilling dénouement have to be seen and heard to be believed. Suffice to say that this Shula is most definitely not a witch, however by the top there isn’t any denying that she—and Nyoni—have a profound capability for magic. ♦