A place in between

Jessie Savini
Review 3
The place in between: 2010. Director: Sarah Bouyain. Producer: Sarah Bouyain Cast: Dorylia Calmel, Acita Ouedraogo, Nathalie Richard. Running time: 90 minutes.

I decided to see The place in between on a whim when I was not able to get into another movie, and I am very glad that I did. I did not know anything about the movie before going into it except for a two line synopsis, so I had no clue what to expect. Not knowing anything about a film going into it is sometimes better because you can be surprised and “get your mind blown”, as one movie critic once told me. I personally got a lot out of this movie, though, and it had a strong impact on me.
The movie carries the weight of deep masked sorrow and is full of buried feelings struggling to be exposed. The place in between tells the story of an adolescent black girl who is lost in her life and does not know who she is. She is seeking her identity and a place to belong in the world. At age eight, her mother sent her to live with a white family in Paris so she could get away from the hardships she faced in Bobo, the rural town she was born in. Years later, she comes back to the town in search of what she is missing and determined to connect with her birth mother. She only finds her aunt and cousin living in her childhood home, and neither of them even recognizes her.
She goes back the next day to explain who she is, and they embrace her in a warm welcome. They tell her how they have missed her, how they want her to stay with them, and how they want to become a family. Though she does not respond to their proposition, she does say she will stay for a while and get to know them. At this point in the movie the young girl does not know what she wants in life or who she wants to be – a girl living a life of luxury in Paris with an adopted family, or a young girl living with her blood relatives in a life of struggle and hardship. The rest of the movie shows her journey to find herself, her true identity. Her true identity is unknown; the movie shows that she feels like an outsider in both places both because of her physical appearance and her mental attitude about both situations. While living with her second family in Paris, she was obviously the only person of color in the family. She felt that she did not fit in even after ten years of living with them, both because of the color of her skin and her background. She even struggles with the fact that she does not look the same as everyone else in Bobo: she is light skinned and beautiful, while everyone else is very dark from working outside and the years of hardship are shown through the wrinkles on their faces.
Throughout the movie, there are brief flashes of her mother and what she is doing during the present day. She is living in Paris, working as a janitor in an office building. The movie showed the girl searching for her mother, asking everyone in town where she could be in hope that she would someday reconnect with her. She needed her birth mother to tell her who she was, and which path to take. All the while, it would flash back to the mother, show what she was doing while her daughter was searching for her, and expose how much the mother missed her daughter as well. She was unhappy and lonely without her daughter, but it was something she was willing to do in order to give her daughter a better life. At the end of the movie, the girl eventually discovers where her mother is living, but it does not show whether she will go find her or not.
The cinematography of the scenes in Bobo was striking and contributed to the overall mood of the story. It showed the tough life in this small town and how dirt poor the family was; it showed the beauty of every object – the hand painted vase in the back corner of the room, the smile wrinkles on the old aunt, and the intricately patterned hair scarves the women wear. The town was extremely poor and the cinematography helped expose how underprivileged the family really was; there was no running water in the house, the family barely had enough food to survive, and they all slept on one bed with towels as blankets. Everything in the town was covered in a thick film of brown dust, which represented the unsanitary conditions in which they lived. There was one particular scene which stands out in my mind: the girl is walking through the market and the camera is focused on her feet. I could see that her shoes were rundown and falling apart, the brown dust was covering her feet and legs, and the bottom of her skirt showed the wear and tear of many years of use.
This film was not only a story of lost identity. It was a story of communication, perseverance, and conflict. There is a language barrier between the young girl and her aunt, so her cousin must translate for them which makes everything even more difficult. There is also the element of determination; the girl is determined to find her mother and to reconnect with her past so she can get a sense of where she comes from. Lastly, it tells of internal and external conflict; she has the daily mental struggle as to which family to be loyal to, and both families struggle with letting her go. The girl is conflicted with the right thing to do, the right path to take.
I really appreciated this movie and the thoughts it provoked within me. I have been that girl. I think every girl has been that girl right there with me, and right there with the main character in this film. Everyone has a point in life where they question their identity and what they mean to the world, just as the young girl did. She was lost and needed to find herself, find where she was from, and find who she was in the present day. The ending of the movie left me to wonder what she was going to do; was she going to stay true with her roots and her birth-given identity of a black female in a rural village, or is she going to go back to her white family in Paris to live the luxurious life that they have? I like that the movie did not show what she was going to do because it could have ruined the film for me. I do not know what she should have done; both endings have complications which would have hurt her in some way, and I would rather not know which route she eventually took. I hope that her time spent in both places did help her find the girl within herself that she was seeking, and that she came out a stronger person because of it.
This movie was a glimmer of hope in all the bad movies I have seen lately. It was a small independent film, but there story was good and it was filmed well. Every element of the story was necessary; there was no fluff and everything pieced together perfectly to form a remarkable story. The cultural clashes she encountered were very raw and exposed the struggle with which background to choose. She comes to understand how different both of her backgrounds are, and how they are interwoven to make her who she is in present day.