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‘Black Tea’ Review: Abderrahmane Sissako’s Cross-Cultural Love Story is a Disappointingly Weak Brew
In 'Black Tea,' his first feature since 2014's Oscar-nominated 'Timbuktu,' Mauritanian master Abderrahmane Sissako feels out of his element.
And if that seems a trite metaphor related to the beverage, this tepid Berlinale competition entry has plenty more of its own: A love story between a Chinese tea-shop owner and an Ivory Coast émigré that is rooted in the rituals of brewing and consuming the blessed leaves, the film aims for woozy sensualism but falls way short on the ambient richness and X-factor chemistry required to sell such an essentially confected exercise. Though this multinational production has already locked down an imminent release in Sissako’s adoptive country of France — where “Timbuktu” premiered at Cannes and reigned over the Césars in its year — it’s hard to see arthouse distributors in other territories flocking to a significantly less consequential affair, which oddly holds back on the sensory spectacle you might expect from a film seeking to do for mountain oolong what “The Taste of Things” did for baked Alaska. The streetscape is gradually overlaid with parallel images from another side of the world — eventually made out through the murk as the Chinese port city of Guangzhou, where Aya reemerges in a declarative red gown and Afro hairdo, as a part-Bambara cover of the Leslie Bricusse standard “Feeling Good” by Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara consumes the soundtrack.
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