Maybe You Can Go Home Again, Samba Traore

Thirty four years ago, the Burkinabé drama Samba Traore from the late director Idrissa Ouedrago won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. His triumph ended up being a beginning of the end. Flush with success, Ouedrago abandoned his native tongue to make films in European languages with a better budget, but he never again reached the heights of Samba Traore. And, as so many 90s Silver Bear winners, Samba Traore itself faded from memory, unavailable for streaming internationally mainly because it didn’t occur to the owner to try to sell the streaming rights. That changes with the new 4K restoration of Samba Traore, premiering at the Lincoln Center on August 28, the bittersweet return of the film mirroring the journey of its protagonist.

Samba Traore ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Directed by: Idrissa Ouédraogo
Written by: Santiago Amigorena, Jacques Arhex, Idrissa Ouédraogo
Starring: Bakary Sangaré, Mariam Kaba, Abdoulaye Komboudri, Irène Tassembedo, Moumouni Campaoré
Running time: 85 minutes

Samba Traore starts out with a gas station robbery that ends almost as soon as it starts, but the movie quickly retreats to a more wistful tone. When the title character returns to his home village with his ill-gotten gains, the drama fades quickly. We never find out who Samba was working with or why they wanted the money. What we do find out is that when Samba gets back to his home village, his hideout doesn’t seem planned. He’s quiet, maybe he was always quiet, and while friends and family are suspicious of how he could make so much money so quickly they don’t ask questions.

Samba Traore is eerily prescient of how the modern internationally connected economy leads to feelings of alienation at home. We know, without having to be explicitly told, that Samba left the village in the first place at least in part to earn money. The village is an economically poor backwater while city life promises… something. Samba no longer seems to know what. Indeed, one of the great ironies of the film is that despite Samba’s fear that he’s being hunted by someone from the city, barely anyone in the city seems to have noticed or care that he’s gone. We eventually do get confirmation that the police are, indeed, looking for him, but their investigation evidently hasn’t made much progress since apparently no one who knew Samba in the city had any idea where his hometown was.

In his hometown, Samba finds comparatively little drama. The uselessness of his money is quickly demonstrated when Samba’s first idea is to use it to gamble it against his old buddy Salif. Samba quickly realizes that all he can really get with his money here is… more money. Samba lacks any apparent goal or purpose, now that he has more money than he has any idea what to do with. The money, and his pursuit of it, has turned into an allegory of the aimlessness of his past ambitions, when all he really wants is acceptance from community.

Like last year’s Sinners, which also features robbers returning to their backwater hometown to open a club with the proceeds, Samba sets up a local neighborhood bar with his childhood friend Salif. However, where Sinners was explicitly about spectacle, about bringing the big city back home as if there was anything about the main characters’ odyssey there that was validating or worthwhile, Samba Traore has much more humble ambitions. Samba, Salif, and other people just chill out there listening to music.

Samba’s humility is the anchor holding Samba Traore in place. Although the audience knows that he’s a criminal in hiding, it’s all too easy to root for Samba as he woos Saratou, a local woman who, like him, sought her fortune in the city only to find it was an empty chalice. For her it was not poisoned, like the one Samba grabbed, just  empty. Saratou conspicuously has a son but no husband. When the taciturn woman finally opens up about what happened, Samba Traore eschews any trauma dump or self-pity to present the situation as matter-of-fact. Life doesn’t go as planned. After a certain point, the drama of the city just loses its appeal. Samba and Saratou both understand this with a quiet reserve that never needs spelling out.

Instead of wallowing in the trauma of the robbery, Samba presents as a man sincerely trying to make a fresh start with his life. What happened at the gas station eats away at him not because Samba acted evilly, but because he believes that his ambitions were fundamentally selfish and petty. He can’t come up with a good reason why he did it. And without putting too fine a point on it, Samba is too simple-minded a protagonist to be able to come up with a decent rationalization.

Samba Traore is a masterclass in understatement, its tight 85 minute runtime a testament to how complexity and exposition aren’t everything. Some facts aren’t worth dwelling on in this tale of people who move past their problems by trying instead to focus on moments in the here-and-now that have meaning to them. Samba isn’t a great man. He isn’t even a good man. But he is a man, one who has come to accept his mediocrity, yet does not allow that to convince him that he doesn’t deserve to be treated with kindness and love, or that he is incapable of expressing kindness and love in his own right. Through this, he is able to cure his loneliness before it metastasizes into an epidemic. We should all be so lucky.