Pierrette, a gifted seamstress and a mother of three, can’t seem to catch a break. After a hard day’s work at her humble shop in Douala, a busy city in Cameroon, she’s mugged by a motorcycle taxi driver. It’s also the rainy season and her home — and later her shop — is flooded overnight. It’s a foul time to be broke: The kids are heading back to school and their supplies aren’t cheap.
The events of “Mambar Pierrette” are fictional, but the film’s nonprofesssional actors play versions of themselves. The drama is the first narrative feature by Rosine Mbakam, a Cameroonian filmmaker based in Belgium. Over the past decade, Mbakam has distinguished herself as a formidable verité-style documentarian; her subjects, Cameroonian women at home and overseas.
Pierrette Aboheu Njeuthat, cast in the title role, is Mbakam’s cousin, and many of the figures who orbit Pierrette’s life are the actress’s neighbors and relatives.
A rich community portrait unfolds as Pierrette prepares her clients’ orders and flits around town putting out fires. We get a sense of the patriarchal customs that dictate village life; the frictions between modern, enterprising women like Pierrette and tradition-bound ones like her mother. These and other realities are made apparent in a beautifully organic manner, through the kind of intimate chatter that happens between people who’ve known each other for decades.
Pierrette’s rotten luck is no joke. We see, with startling clarity, how a stolen wallet turns into a missed payment, and an electricity shut-off means a sewing machine that can’t sew. Yet the film’s gentle naturalism (at times edging on the uncanny, courtesy of cheeky editing rhythms and an unsettling-looking mannequin) gives her tribulations a cosmic undertone.
Mbakam hits a remarkable balance. The sociopolitical truths that make up Pierrette’s losing streak are evident, without the miserable patronizing so common in films about struggle in Africa. Also palpable is a more universal gut feeling: the half-serious suspicion that one has been cursed.
Mambar Pierrette
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters.
