A beautiful but inchoate multicultural love story

In his Variety review entitled "Abderrahmane Sissako’s Cross-Cultural Love Story is a Disappointingly Weak Brew," Guy Lodge says of Black Tea that "In his first feature since 2014's Oscar-nominated 'Timbuktu,' the Mauritanian master travels from the Ivory Coast to China to Cape Verde, but never feels in his element." Critical consensus is that the new film isn't up to Sissako's Bamako (2006) or Timbuktu (2014). Jordan Mintzer in his Hollywood Reporter review is less dismissive, simply suggesting this film is too ambiguous and vague to pin down successfully. I myself feel there is good material here, and maybe a good editor could have, just maybe, done something effective with it. But this is a frustrating watch.

The opening scene of the big group wedding with Aya (Nina Mélo) saying "No" to her groom in the front row is a stunner. Exotic and visually eye-pping sequences follow in which Aya has gone to China and has a job in a connoisseur tea shop. We are fascinated by the joint fetishising of tea as the cool and sophisticated middle-aged tea shop owner Cai (Chang Han) woos, and is wooed by, Aya by guiding her hands (and arms and shoulders) through a reverential and appreciative tea ceremony. Perhaps she, with her ultra-elegant hairdo, is also an object of his connoisseurship; but that's an analogy not consciously made.

We're learning with Aya about another maybe more interesting thing: that there is a thriving African diaspora fluent in Mandarin with their own businesses. Notably these include a beauty shop Aya routinely visits to feel community, and tend that stylish hairdo. . As the Ebert reviewer notes, this is "an intriguing premise" and we "welcome a chance to learn about this neighborhood and its inhabitants," though, if Aya does, she doesn't let us in on much of it. We are in the city of Guangzhou, northwest of Hong Kong on the Pearl River that, an online blurb tells us, is noted for "avant-garde architecture such as Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House (known as the 'double pebble'); the carved box-shaped Guangdong Museum; and the iconic Canton TV Tower skyscraper, resembling a thin hourglass." The focus here though is none of those places and instead Chocolate City, a trade center where Africans buy goods they sell back at home. But this is not a tourist but an intimist movie.

And while it isn't very sexy, it is sensual. The scents and textures of tea (and the leaves when Cai and Aya go to the plantation to sample nd pick) are sensuous and meditative, almost religious moments. It's an exotic world where sex, religion, and business blend. But it's all a little bit too-too after a while. This is especially true when it becomes clear with the introduction of multiple unrelated characters and scenes that this film doesn't have a really unified sense of structure and doesn't want to.

Cai has a son and daughter. His son Li-ben is 20 and works in the plantation. Li-ben flirts with Wen (Huang Wei), the lower class employee in the cheap suitcase shop across from Cai's elegant one. When Cai's in-laws visit, the granddad has bought racist propaganda agianst the diasporan African settlers as "animals." Li-ben strenuously objects, but Cai is hiding Aya in his bedroom during this dinner. It turns out Cai also has a daughter by another Ivorian woman who was forced to go home, and his pining to be reunited to her is the cause of a haunting recurrant dream that becomes the pretext for another distracting sequence.

Letterboxd comments tease this film for "not wanting to be a melodrama." Jens on Letterboxd sums up Black Tea all too well as a "Well made but forgettable art house romance, that goes for a sensual In the mood for love vibe" (and this was noted more than once) "but can never make it palpable" and (as I've already noted) "missteps into too much narrative vagueness."

Younger cinephiles seem to think Sissako is trying to evoke WongKar-wai and falling short. The BFI reviewer Nick James goes further and says the Aya-Cai romance is "Made subtly steamy" by "Sissako the cinephile’s burning need to pay tribute to Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou, Stanley Kwan et al (with a modicum of Pedro Costa’s influence too)." James says we could call the tea-obessing section" of the film "In the Mood for Oolong." But James puts his finger on the film's greatest weakness when he comments that Sissako "never knew a minor character anecdote he wouldn’t pause to explore." The main track becomes hard to distinguish from the side tracks.

There is a distraction in the homages and the detours, and one winds up with the impression that despite some beautiful and exotic moments Sissako hasn't gotten his mojo back since his decade-long break. This is a gorgeous, exotic film that brings up interesting diaspora demographics and haunting complications that, unfortuantely, are not welded into a convincing or comprehsnsible whole.

Black Tea, 110 mins., debuted at the Berlinale Feb. 2024. In French, Mandarin, English, Portuguese with English subtitles. Opens in the US May 9, 2025. In NYC at Quad Cinema and Lincoln Center, San Francisco Landmark Opera Plaza.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.