OVP: War Witch (2012)

Film: War Witch (2012)
Stars: Rachel Mwanza, Alain Lino Mic Eli Bastien, Serge Kanyinda, Mizinga Mwinga
Director: Kim Nguyen
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Canada)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

The further we get into the Oscar Viewing Project, the more that I find myself a little perplexed by the Foreign Language Film category.  The Best Picture race usually has a fairly similar set of competitors and plots.  I watched the trailer to The Butler yesterday and thought to myself, "well, there's nine to go."  You can read into the race what you will, but it's fairly obvious when a Best Picture nominee comes along.

This isn't so with the Foreign Film category-you can have films as complicated and difficult as A Separation or Dogtooth or as conventional as Monsieur Lazhar.  With War Witch, Canada's successful inclusion in the race last year, you have a film that tries to be both-it uses a subject frequently honored by the Academy (the struggles of children in the third world) with a drifting, almost dreamlike quality that hints at an auteur's hand.

(Spoilers ahead) The film opens with one of those gut-wrenching scenes that makes you buckle in for a movie that's not going to have many light moments.  Our main character Komona (Mwanza) is forced to either kill her parents with a gun or to watch them die at the hands of a machete.  She picks the former, and we watch as she is forced into the army of a rebel leader.  The leader soon believes that Komona has supernatural powers (a fact that's never totally disputed, though it's hard to tell whether the hallucinogens that Komona is taking is the key factor here and not actual magic), hence the title of the film.

The movie has a surprisingly slow-moving second act, with Komona actually getting a bit of love in her life, as she is protected by an albino boy (slightly older than she) who wants to marry her.  This leads to the films most charming bit-where Komona, not sure if she wants to marry the boy, sends him on a wild goose...err chicken chase, telling him to find a white rooster and then she will marry him.  After many minutes of him encountering only black or brown roosters, eventually he comes across one and has to track down the rooster to marry his love.

The movie, of course, doesn't end there, and Komona is eventually brought back to the rebel camp (her fiance dying in the process), and becomes the sex slave of her captor.  She in turn kills him, and after spending most of the movie trying to bury her parents, eventually buries some of their belongings, knowing that she'll never be able to bury the actual bodies.  The film is a downer of an ending, but probably a realistic one at that.

The film, despite some flourishes and occasional flare, was not for me.  The cinematography is lovely, but it moves too slowly without enough message or theme to justify the long, wordless sequences of the film.  Mwanza, who is excellent in the lead, is the film's best asset, despite no formal training and not being able to read or write at the time of the film.  The fact that she used to be living on the streets of Kinshasa and went on to attend the Academy Awards is a great story, but it doesn't stop the fact that, even with her solid performance, the film meanders and changes flow too often to be considered a great movie, even if it has great attributes.

What were your thought on War Witch?  I've still got two more Foreign Films from 2012 left in the Oscar Viewing Project, but do you think War Witch (or any film) was a match for Amour?  And has anyone seen Mwanza's second film, Kinshasa Kids, to see if she could duplicate this performance?