“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” William Wordsworth wrote about the early days of the French Revolution. “But to be young was very heaven!” “Dancing the Twist in Bamako,” a new feature from the French filmmaker Robert Guédiguian, nimbly captures both the kind of youthful ecstasy Wordsworth recalled and the disillusionment that so often follows.
It’s the early 1960s, and the Republic of Mali (formerly French Sudan) is in the first flush of post-colonial optimism, having declared independence from France a few years before. Samba (Stéphane Bak) spends his days spreading the Marxist gospel promoted by the country’s president, Modibo Keïta, and his evenings at the Happy Boys’ Club, one of many nightspots in Bamako, Mali’s capital, that cater to the local appetite for Western pop music.
Dressed in miliary-style fatigues, Samba and his comrades drive out to rural villages to lecture peasants and landowners on the virtues of collective agriculture. They are as enthusiastic about promoting the cause as having fun, and at first there seems to be no contradiction between politics and pleasure. It’s the ’60s! In the bedroom Samba shares with his music-obsessed brother, Badian (Bakary Diombera), there are posters of Ho Chi Minh and Otis Redding. Socialism and soul music seem like two sides of the same coin.
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Eventually, all the posters will be torn down, and Samba’s experience will spin from disappointment to danger to tragedy. Guédiguian, many of whose previous films have been set in and around the French port city of Marseille, has a jaunty, slightly old-fashioned way with narrative. The plot of “Dancing the Twist” is busy, the emotions big, and the screen sometimes as crowded with character and incident as a page of Dickens.
At the center is the love story between Samba and Lara (Alice Da Luz). The daughter of a lower-caste family, she has been forced into marriage with the loutish, drunken grandson of a village leader, a condition she tries to escape by stowing away in Samba’s truck. He helps her find work and a place to stay in Bamako, and soon they are the most dazzling couple at the Happy Boys’ Club. Samba is confident that the patriarchal traditions oppressing Lara will be swept away by President Keïta’s new order, just as surely as the powerful merchants and feudal bosses will share their wealth with the workers and peasants.
Samba, whose father is a prosperous cloth manufacturer, is a protégé of the minister of youth. Restrictive trade policies split the young man’s loyalties between these two paternal figures — just one of the tensions that start to undermine his optimism, and the bright future he and Lara symbolize. Her husband and brother are hunting for her in Bamako, and a culturally conservative faction in the government has decided that European fashion and American rock ’n’ roll are corrupting Mali’s youth and begun a crackdown on the clubs.
In a defiant speech to a room full of officials, Samba paraphrases Lenin, declaring that “Socialism is the Soviets, plus electrification, plus the twist!” To take another page from the left-wing songbook, he wants bread and roses, too. But his exuberant romanticism puts him increasingly at odds with his comrades, who are more interested in the cold exercise of power than in the joy of liberation.
“Dancing the Twist in Bamako” is entirely, and not altogether persuasively, on the side of joy. Even the grim path of history — emphasized in an epilogue set 50 years later, during the rule of Islamists who restricted every kind of music — can’t suppress the film’s effervescence. Some of that comes from the music, a well-chosen sampling of English- and French-language radio hits. The cast is also dynamic and sincere in a way that gives the drama a buoyant teen-movie spirit even as it takes a grave turn. It’s affecting, but also a bit glib.
Beautiful, though. Guédiguian (assisted by his director of photography, Pierre Milon) pays tribute to Malick Sidibé, a Malian photographer who documented the early years of independence, represented in the film as a genial presence with a narrow-brimmed fedora, on hand to record the turmoil and the delight of the young nation. He’s both a character and an aesthetic inspiration for the movie’s elegant, kinetic, color-filled frames, which conjure a lost but nonetheless vivid moment of bliss.
Dancing the Twist in Bamako
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters.
