Central African Brussels
Omen, Directed by Baloji
By Charlie Bertsch
Omen confirms that Belgian-Congolese rapper Baloji has a rare talent for transubstantiation.
His debut feature converts the potential energy of hip-hop into a searing experience.
Even at its most opaque, the film holds our attention, demonstrating how much life is left in the surprising juxtapositions of the montage aesthetic.
Whereas pioneering 1990s pictures like Boyz in the Hood and Menace II Society did their best to recreate the power of lyrics at the level of content, Baloji does so with form.
This means that someone expecting a neat and tidy story arc will be disappointed.
Omen follows four interlocking storylines but largely forsakes the narrative connecting tissue that made the stories of landmark Hollywood ensemble films like Robert Altman’s Nashville or Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show compelling to a broad audience.
Baloji prefers to bring his stories together with rhythm and rhyme, even if that threatens to leave literal-minded viewers in the dark.
Nevertheless, the director does provide a conceptual frame to offset the forces threatening to tear Omen apart: superstition.
Koffi, the first of the four characters on which the film focuses, clearly stands in for Baloji himself.
He and his white partner Alice, who is pregnant with twins, return to his native Congo to pay his family a dowry and, they hope, secure its blessing.
But their best-laid plans go awry when Koffi, whose face displays a wine-stain birthmark interpreted as a sign of the devil, succumbs to a nosebleed as he and Alice look at his infant nephew, with the red drops on the child interpreted as a deliberate curse.
By this point, we have already seen Alice reluctantly shaving off Koffi’s afro prior to their leaving Belgium and know that he struggles to communicate in Swahili.
The intransigence of the Congolese community the couple encounters, its apparent willingness always to presume the worst of them, might seem to make Omen a critique of the respect for tradition that inspires their journey.
Koffi and Alice’s abject failure to elicit sympathy suggests that we are watching a horror film, like the kind of voodoo exploitation movies that have periodically resurfaced in the West since the early years of cinema.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
Once Omen abruptly shifts from Koffi’s storyline to that of Paco, who leads a band of menacing boys who wear pink tutus, we realise that Baloji has a more complex point in mind.
The final two sections of Omen, featuring Koffi’s sister Tshala, the only relative who shows him kindness during his stay, and their mother Mujila, further complicate matters.
Not only do we recognise how growing up in a land collectively traumatised by the worst kind of European imperialism has made the Congolese suspicious of anything associated with the West, but we also come to see how superstition and reason are intertwined for everybody.
Discerning this dialectical argument is much easier if we know Baloji’s personal history.
Born out of wedlock to a Belgian father and Congolese mother, the rapper grew up in Europe without any direct experience of her or her homeland.
Baloji broke with his father in his teens and got in trouble with the law, yet managed to survive and thrive as a member of the famous Belgian hip-hop group Starflam, where he went by the name MC Balo.
After leaving Starflam in the early 2000s, Baloji embarked on a solo career in which he has consistently tried to reconnect with his Congolese heritage through music.
He has described his remarkable 2007 debut, Hotel Impala, as an autobiographical record that he presented to his incredulous mother in the Congo as a way to reconnect with her.
On the title track, Baloji makes it clear that he does not mean to condescend:
Il est temps de se réconcilier, avec son passé
Retrouver ce que la folie nous a dévalisé
Ever since, Baloji’s music has reflected a keen desire to bridge the difference between Europe and Africa, the problematic rationality of the modern West with the equally problematic, paganistically enhanced Catholicism of the Congo.
In “Karibu Ya Bintou”, his stunning collaboration with the Congolese band Konono No. 1 on his second album, Kinshasa Succursale, he explicitly calls out European intellectuals who have fetishised supposedly primitive African culture.
The extraordinarily compelling video for the song is a joyful tribute to the war and corruption-ravaged mega-city for which the album is named.
Omen continues Baloji’s struggle to reconcile with the Congo, the land which could only feel like a home away from home to him, yet always called to him from afar.
As the video for “Karibu Ya Bintou” thematises, the name Baloji refers to a traditional man of knowledge, a “scientist” in the sense of Lee Scratch Perry’s dub worldview, the sort persecuted by Christian priests after the European takeover of the Congo.
Sometimes, the best way of connecting is to lean into the creative possibilities of disjunction.
With Omen, Baloji announces himself as a major artist who has fully transcended the medium that brought him fame without forsaking its principles.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.