We begin with Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker about Alain Gomis’s Félicité, “a dramatic portrait of a fierce, intrepid woman—a single mother and a powerfully expressive cabaret singer (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu) in Kinshasa who is wrenched from her routine and discovers newfound purpose when her teen-age son, Samo (Gaetan Claudia), suffers a motorbike accident and is at risk of losing a leg. The movie is, in part, a musical, featuring exhilarating performances by Beya and her band in night-club scenes roiled with dance, alcohol, and eros, and perched on the edge of violence—but it’s all the more an incisive work of sociopolitical analysis, focussed on the health-care system of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
“Céline Bozon’s restless cinematography captures the crush of the daytime crowd just as deftly as it dips its toes into endless, allusive night,” writes Dan Sullivan for Cinema Scope, “and Félicité alluringly oscillates from the high-energy, casually tragic reality of the street to the faintly phantasmagorical serenity of the nocturnal realm and back again. These two worlds are bridged by a wealth of music—both in the form of Félicité’s performances and Félicité’s top-notch soundtrack—effectively clarifying what’s at stake in Gomis’s film: a not-at-all corny case for art as an instrument of peace and a means of survival.”
“Though the second half turns somewhat diffuse, Gomis’s tough and vibrant understanding of romance and struggle scarcely falters,” writes Fernando F. Croce in the Notebook. “Neither does his sense of wonder toward his indomitable leading lady: Riding in the back of a motorcycle, Beya might be Gong Li in Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju or one of Satyajit Ray’s proud women, all too aware of the peril and autonomy of living day to day and song to song.”
For Clayton Dillard at Slant, “the film's sudden devotion to symbolism, as in repeated visions of Félicité descending into bodies of water amid darkness, never transcends stylish posturing to ever give a concrete sense of Félicité's trauma.” What’s more, Gomis “never reconciles throughout how the film's disparate parts, which variously represent memories, dreams, and the hardship of everyday life, are meant to fit together. In the end, Félicité feels at best incomplete because it has circled around a multitude of potential thematic directions without meaningfully committing to any.”
“However porous the boundary between reality and fantasy may be in Félicité, the film, grounded by Mputu’s intricate weariness, never falters,” counters Melissa Anderson at 4Columns.
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“Overlong, with too many repeated beats, Gomis’s is a film of many hues, with surreal, symbolic flashbacks, local color (a very real traffic robot) glimpsed during motorbike and car rides, and the ever-present medicine of music in the air,” finds Justin Stewart at In Review Online.
“As the film festival circuit winds on,” writes Bradley Warren at the Playlist, “Félicité is nothing but enriched by its adjacent programming to Cannes-feted non-fiction Makala, which brings a more measured, observational eye to its Congolese subject’s economic plight. Gomis’s immediacy and documentarian Emmanuel Gras’s rigor may seem at odds, but are ultimately complimentary. Both features privilege the dignity and perseverance of their characters over crude images of poverty. Although the existence of Félicité, justly awarded the runner-up prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, might only be possible because of the financial and technical resources of the French and larger European film industry, its humanist, musical vibrancy makes a major case for the significance and individuality of African cinema.”
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