Shortly before the credits roll on “Chez Jolie Coiffure,” a customer in the eponymous hair salon asks her stylist, Sabine, if she has any plans to go home this year. Out of context, thi…
,” a customer in the eponymous hair salon asks her stylist, Sabine, if she has any plans to go home this year. Out of context, this sounds like the kind of standard, empty small talk one often makes while having one’s hair cut: what good movies you’ve seen recently, what you’re doing for the holidays, and so on.
“Chez Jolie Coiffure” is one of a pair of complementary but individually self-contained documentaries by Mbakam to examine West African female identity and displacement, both simultaneously released Stateside by Icarus Films.
It’s a space she’s had to find several times before. To camera, Sabine relates the story of a Cameroonian woman who escaped to Europe via the gateway of Lebanon, where she was ostensibly employed as a housemaid, but really hustled into slavery; stripped of her passport, she escaped through Turkey to Greece. Though she relates this nightmare narrative with anecdotal detachment, it’s her own story.
Mbakam’s shooting style is candid and artless: Figures cross and block the camera as the chaotic bustle of Sabine’s everyday trade and social life is established. But while “Chez Jolie Coiffure” is an intimately observational work, it’s not entirely a fly-on-the-wall exercise: Mbakam deftly draws out conversation and confession, making her close-quarters camera a confidante to its subjects. It’s a kinder, more engaged approach than that taken by other outside visitors to this diasporic oasis.
: An Icarus Films release of a Tandor Prods. production in co-production with L'Atelier Cinema du Gsara, WIP, Indigo Mood Films. Producer: Geoffroy Cernaix.
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