Art & Authenticy

Maybe I did not pay close enough attention to director Souleymane Cissé’s film, “Min Yé, Tell Me Who You Are”, but I seemed to have missed the main point. The film was meant to portray the injustice the main character Mimi must have felt when her husband Issa married another woman and what she had lived with for years; instead, it was one long, confusing film full of Mimi’s complaints and epic hissy fits. I felt no sympathy for her; if anything, I felt bad that Issa had to listen to her. This film had potential to be excellent, and truly cause its viewers to feel empathy towards women but instead just made me count down the 135 minutes of this film. If only the characters had been portrayed just a bit more differently, perhaps the film would have had a whole different aura instead of being both boring and biased. Indeed, the only lesson I truly learned from this movie is that sometimes a director’s view on a subject is so biased that it can be seen through every aspect of the film, most importantly the characters.