Our Lady of the Chinese Shop: a spirited if messy postcolonial allegory
The debut feature from Angolan director Ery Claver deftly boils down the knotty politics of China’s gnawing influence over Angola into the story of one merchant’s opportunism. But its panoply of styles and modes lacks discipline.
In a telling scene from Angolan director Ery Claver’s Our Lady of the Chinese Shop, a power-hungry barber stares at the tacky, mass-produced Virgin Mary doll of the film’s title. Recently shipped into Luanda, Angola’s capital, by a Chinese merchant profiting from the city’s Catholicism, the doll will go on to have profound effects on the inhabitants. “The Chinese,” the barber says to himself, awestruck, “did a beautiful thing.”
What that beautiful thing might be – and the ways it’s revealed to be manifestly ugly – drive this mesmerising odyssey into Luanda as a pulsing postcolonial metropolis. In his directorial debut, Claver, who is part of Geração 80, the experimental audiovisual collective behind 2020’s Air Conditioner, tracks the ripple effect of the religious icon on three separate residents. There’s Domingas, the grieving mother whose roof is punctured by a mysterious, unfixable leak; Zoyo, whose search for his missing dog draws us most extensively into Luanda’s streets; and the megalomaniacal barber Pelle, who exploits the doll’s influence to start his own evangelical cult.
Claver deftly boils down the knotty politics of China’s gnawing influence over Angola to a single merchant’s opportunism – his trade in the marketplace of faith, once monopolised by Portuguese colonists. And this exchange isn’t fair game: each transaction in the film – each “beautiful thing” – is tainted by the invisible hands of influence and abuse, evolving into a staggering allegory for Luanda’s wrestle with its colonial past, and ambivalent trudge into its transnational present. If history is a nightmare, Domingas, Zoyo and Pelle have yet to wake.
Over the otherwise disparate congregation of characters, the Chinese merchant narrates scenes with enigmatic lines of poetry, creating the uncanny sensation of life turning into fable in real-time. The real and the allegorical occasionally chafe against each other in the film, a friction replicated in the two visual styles adopted by cinematographer Eduardo Kropotkine: a naturally lit, shaky-cam realism for Zoyo’s subplot, alternating with a luxuriant, almost painterly attention to colour and composition in scenes with Domingas. The film’s most arresting images soar off the screen. But by the prologue – distractingly placed two-thirds of the way in – Claver and Kropotkine lose control of these competing elements, as the ambition to capture a panorama of characters, styles and histories begins to come unstuck. The prologue’s satirical conference-cum-banquet held for Luanda’s elites is deflated by an unconvincing absurdism, while the film’s ending, invested with the spirit of Do the Right Thing’s iconic trashcan hurl, hasn’t quite earned its explosive curtain fall.
With its dangling plot threads and dazzling display of cultural hybridity, Our Lady of the Chinese Shop isn’t just postcolonial: it’s postmodern. And as with many works within this mode, it’s enriched by its astonishing spirit – and beset by its excessive sprawl.
► Our Lady of the Chinese Shop is part of the First Feature Competition at the 2022 London Film Festival; it is screening on 12, 13 and 16 October.