A masked woman rides across the desert on horseback. She stops at an oasis, pulls down her shirt and pumps milk out of her breasts into the clear waters. The milk churns through the water, completely pink – it’s milk mixed with blood. So opens Congolese filmmaker Baloji’s first feature Omen. It’s an opening that appropriately recalls the surrealist imagery of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, for much like that film, Omen is a hypnagogic melodrama that gets high off its own vibrant, mystical imagery while keenly doubling as a national allegory.
Mixing colorful imagery with character-study, the film starts as the story of Koffi (Marc Zinga) as he returns to his native Congo after a long period of absence to visit his family and introduce them to his pregnant European wife, Alice (Lucy Debay). Only his parents won’t see him, his cousins make fun of how European he looks, and his uncle puts him on trial in a shamnic ritual for accidentally bleeding on his newborn nephew. Turned away and demeaned by the culture he once called home, Koffi is the proverbial fish out of water in a world rendered fantastic and terrifying. From gang fights in mining factory yards to lengthy shamanistic rituals. Baloji colors the world around Koffi with abundant supporting details that add a mysterious tension to the narrative.
Baloji, a musician who honed his filmmaking craft doing the production design, costumes, and directing for his own music videos, balances the story’s melodrama with a focus on colorful imagery that, at times, dips closer to video art than narrative cinema. Parallel to Koffi’s story is the story of teenage gang-member Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya) who lives in a school bus with his fellow tutu-wearing gang members and finds himself stuck in tribalistic battles with rival gangs threatening his sister. With little tangible bearing on the Koffi storyline, much of this second narrative feels primarily motivated by the sharp visuals and Matthew Blarney-esque maximalist production design. It’s oftentimes jaw-dropping, but also stultifying and momentum-killing – you might, at first, awe over non-sequiturs like a poppish retelling of the Hansel and Gretal story in the Congolese jungle, but as time goes on, moments like these are more likely to confuse than impress.
It’s slightly unfortunate, for one of the most surprising parts of Omen is how much the familial drama lands despite the slight disconnect between it and the fantastic visuals. As Baloji builds the world around Koffi, extending the drama out to incorporate his sister, Tshalla (Eliane Umuhire), and mom (Yves-Marina Gnahoua), the film creates a vivid portrait of intergenerational tensions in the Congo and the clash between tradition and western-modernity. Through vivid snapshots of the mom’s long-simmering resentment toward her marriage, literally bleeding into Koffi through breast-feeding, and Tshalla’s delicate balancing of tradition in her relationship, Baloji creates a world in which the past and present are perpetually in conflict.
Omen wears its cross-cultural tensions on its sleeves and this somewhat justifies the somewhat discordant form, allowing for fascinating contrasts in style and tone that are provocative even if they’re not always engaging. Not least of the many ironies in the film is its place as Belgium’s submission to this year’s Oscars. A remarkable, left-field choice, that grants the film a stamp of institutional acceptance that threatens to undermine its potential provocation as much as it aids it in getting its message across. Ultimately, however, this is a film that in many ways succeeds as a first feature as much as anything, showcasing the myriad talents of a director with promise.
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