Recently shown at the Cannes Internation Film Festival, Augure from Belgian rapper turned filmmaker Baloji starts out feeling a lot like if Midsommar were set in the Congo, but it quickly carves out its own unique space. Our initial lead character Koffi (Marc Zinga), returns to his home country from Europe with Alice (Lucie Debay), his pregnant and white fiancee, at his side. He’s back to pay a dowry to his father and his family are not very friendly. He accidentally bleeds from his nose onto a child and his family ties him to a tree with a mask helmet locked to his head. His fiancee manages to break it off.
This point early on is when the film veers sharply away from being another Midsommar. Three more characters will take turns as the focal point of the movie. We have Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya), the young leader of a gang all wearing pink dresses. Then Tshala (Eliane Umuhire), Koffi’s sister who’s lifestyle marks her as an outsider from the family as well. And finally their mother Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua), who initially is hard to love but we get to hear her side of the story near the end of the movie.
Koffi though is the character who from the beginning stays in a seeming horror show despite being mostly unloved and at many times hated, and who pops in and out of the others’ stories. We don’t know if he will ever find his absent father to perform his filial duty. Zinga plays the character with great sweetness and an inadvisable persistence that becomes understandable. Koffi was sent away at a young age, returning now after fifteen years. In preparation for the trip back, we see him study the local language to better communicate with his people. Very quickly though we’ll see him have to switch back to French to talk with a group of young people who stare at him like he’s an alien.
His hometown, Lubumbashi (the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s second largest city), sprawls out before us at street level and in dark cityscapes. It’s Holy Week, the final week of Lent leading up to Easter. Hallucinatory festivities pop up all over the city including circus-like street boxing matches. Rival gangs of very young people square off. They have colourful matching outfits like the gangs in The Warriors, but their menace and pain feels a lot more down to earth.
The movie begins to feel a little more straightforward when Koffi’s sister Tshala meets his fiancee Lucie. Tshala helps to explain the family dynamic and the reasons she and Koffi don’t fit into it. Moments of joy and beauty still come out of nowhere though like a group of three door to door salesmen singing their sales pitch.
Koffi leaves the country and returns again with his twin children now. He’s still intent on paying the dowry to his father. This section with his mother is maybe the first time anyone speaks to him directly and frankly about everything. She explains her own painful relationship she had with his father. Her explanations may not fix everything he feels but they are true. Something starts to make sense about why Koffi just wouldn’t escape a terrible situation when he has had every opportunity to do so. They’ve never been trying to capture him, they’ve always wanted him gone. Paco, the gang leader in a young girl’s pink dress, gets his closure in a much more direct way.
In a scene near the end, women mourners fill a dark room. They wail as water pools on the floor. Grieving is a ceremony intended to provide impossible closure as well. For me the film represents, in all its hallucinatory beauty, the illogical but very important need to find meaning in all the things that have hurt us.
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