‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’ Review: Another Great Film from Rungano Nyoni
Thanks to a magnifying lead turn from Susan Chardy, Rungano Nyoni ensures you will not forget On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, as one of the year’s most important movies.
With Zhao Tao in Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, Susan Chardy (so far) gives the year’s best performance in Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. As Shula, she is a woman of few emotions, at least for the bulk of its 97-minute runtime after discovering the dead body of her Uncle Fred (Roy Chisha) on an empty road in the middle of the night. Everyone around her is mourning this shocking, unexpected loss. Fred’s widow, sister, and mother are inconsolable, not knowing what to do in the wake of his passing. On the other hand, Shula doesn’t say a word, nor express any sympathy towards the recently deceased, or their family.
In fact, Shula doesn’t say much of anything for a while, even during conversations with her cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) after she also stumbles on the body. One wonders why she is like this and why she doesn’t want to express her feelings towards Fred’s family, considering how devastated they have been since the news of his passing. However, it eventually becomes clear that her restraint speaks louder than words, and the deliberate choice of saying – and conveying – nothing is all that needs to be said. This becomes evident when she picks up her other cousin, Bupe (Esther Singini), who reveals who Fred really was towards her and many members of the community.
At that point, the movie opens itself up in ways that seem incredibly obvious, yet act as a shock to the system when Nyoni associates fragmented bits of documentary footage related to the Guinea Fowl’s place in the cycle of nature with the events that transpire within Shula’s inner circle. It would be futile to reveal what transpires in this review, but what comes after the revelation is both heartbreaking and important. And it’s all distilled through Susan Chardy’s magnifying lead turn, as a woman who prefers her silence to reverberate throughout the family instead of saying a word.
What destabilizes the family so much is exactly that – everyone feeling deep sorrow over Fred’s death, but not Shula, and definitely not Bupe, who is still reeling from the trauma that Fred inflicted upon her. Even as she attempts to pick up the pieces and move on, now that he has passed away, the scars of the past are still felt within her body, and there’s doubt she will ever recover from them. Bupe and Shula will carry what they know about Fred, and what Fred did to them, to their graves, despite the division this is causing within their inner circle.
What’s particularly interesting about Nyoni’s approach isn’t so much its associative imagery, though the fragmented shots of a younger Shula taking the adult version’s place do give us a deeper understanding of who the character is beyond her stiff, almost unresponsive, facial expressions. What’s most compelling is how the filmmaker immediately primes audiences about the undercurrent of tragedy by filling her script with as much mordant humor as possible, and forcing us to dig deep into its dark comedy to find exactly the message she wants us to discover.
When one unpeels those layers, Nyoni opens the movie and reveals what it’s been about all along. And it’s at that point where On Becoming a Guinea Fowl reaches a significant final shot, one that will linger in your memory long after the sounds of the titular animal stop echoing in your living room (sadly, A24 did not give this film a Canadian theatrical release, but audiences can now watch it on video-on-demand). All of this is anchored through Chardy’s towering portrayal of Shula, whose restrained emotions are so powerful that one can feel the devastation in her eyes from the minute she takes off the mask from her Missy Elliott costume and shows us how she feels.
Very few actors can express a litany of emotions without saying a word, and with only their face. Zhao Tao brilliantly did so in Caught by the Tides just a few weeks ago, and now Chardy joins these ranks with her first-ever screen role in Nyoni’s film. Perhaps it may not reach the same level of affection Zhao Tao gives in Jia’s movie, but it’s equally as powerful, if not more cathartic, than the Chinese screen legend. I doubt I’ll see a better breakout role this year, and perhaps a better performance.
She’s the main reason why the film is worth your attention, and it remains baffling as to why A24 would ever unceremoniously dump it the way they did. Now that it’s come out to stream at home, there’s no excuse for you to see it for yourself and get soaked into Nyoni’s poignant, evocative drama where silence speaks far louder than words, and the imprint of its images has a much deeper significance than you are led to believe. Perhaps it was forgotten by the very studio that acquired it, but On Becoming a Guinea Fowl will age better than any of the studio’s most recent attempts at commercial cinema, with Friendship being the sole exception.