“Dao” opens with onscreen text defining its title as “a perpetual and circular movement which flows in everything and unites the world” — one way to articulate that famously intangible, widely traveled philosophical concept, and the one that works best for French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis‘s kinetic, freewheeling, cross-continental sixth feature. It’s also, thankfully, the only time his idea-rich but extravagantly sensory film chooses to directly explain itself. All other meaning in this vast, shape-shifting examination of globalization and diasporic identity is to be found in its keen observation of faces, places and restless human movement, as it follows a pair of French Bissau-Guinean women through a pair of ceremonial family gatherings, rooted in opposite halves of their cultural identity.
In one, second-generation immigrant Gloria (Katy Correa) returns to her father’s home village in rural Guinea-Bissau for a traditional memorial ritual to mark the old man’s recent passing, and to introduce her twentysomething daughter Nour (D’Johé Kouadio) to her ancestral motherland. In the other, Nour’s lavish, raucous wedding brings hordes of African and European guests to an upmarket French country estate, cuing a host of cultural microaggressions and more directly enacted conflicts.
Swaying to and fro between these two sprawling, heavily storied affairs over an imposing but immersive three-hour runtime, “Dao” is a dazzling culmination of personal, political and stylistic fixations explored across the oeuvre of Gomis — best known internationally for his flavorful Congo-set character study “Félicité,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2017 Berlinale and placed on the international Oscar shortlist. Though its supersized scale and meandering narrative structure may deter less adventurous arthouse distributors, Gomis’s latest work (also premiering in competition at Berlin) nonetheless feels like his most vibrantly expansive and accessible, inviting widespread audience identification with its culturally scattered characters.
In a theoretically radical formal gambit that plays with remarkable immediacy, Gomis introduces his characters via the casting sessions for the actors playing them — striking an early note of documentary intimacy that permeates the otherwise scripted proceedings. “You’re going to be a real fake family,” Gomis tells the members of his ensemble in a blank white rehearsal room, before they variously voice their own ideas and hopes for a story they haven’t yet been told. (“I don’t want to play a battered, submissive woman,” insists one, “unless it’s one who kills her husband.”) And it’s in this interstitial space between reality and fiction that the drama begins, with Correa and Kouadio rehearsing a key inciting scene — as college student Nour informs her apprehensive mother that she’s engaged to be married.
From there, we’re thrown into the film’s actual twin settings. The light, liquid playing of South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim — lifted from his landmark album “Blues for a Hip King,” which scores proceedings throughout — consumes the soundtrack, as the camera tracks a long, bumpy drive into Guinea-Bissau’s remote heartland on the one hand, and an ebulliently joyriding Just Married convoy through French wine country on the other.
The precise chronological gap between these two events isn’t made clear as the film darts between them, though it’s obvious that they’re closely bonded for 50-year-old Gloria, an independent-minded woman at something of a crossroads in her life as she sheds the direct responsibilities of motherhood. Her father — whom she describes, not with any particular animus, as “tough” — brought her up in Paris before returning to his African homeland later in life, and something in Gloria envies him that sense of attachment. She regards the hardscrabble, tradition-bound ways of life in the village with a kind of fond second-hand nostalgia, but also a degree of the touristic curiosity that Nour feels on her first visit “home.”
Often entrusted to tell the story with her silent, drifting gaze, the temperature of scenes shifting according to who she’s watching and how, Correa gives an altogether remarkable performance as a someone who’s been made to feel an outsider in all spaces of her life, with or without family. She carries herself with straight-backed, self-sufficient dignity but also instinctive, retiring caution, loath to step outside the margins. On the guest list at the wedding, but discreetly seated at the next table, is her white boyfriend François, whom she likes without having any desire to deepen or advertise their relationship.
Her prudency stands in stark contrast to another interracial pairing that ruffles feathers at the event: a prodigal son turning up unannounced with a heavily pregnant white girlfriend, named Calypso to boot. Gomis’ complex, patient scene construction lets such tensions lie and ripple and occasionally erupt, though there’s always too much going on for any single mini-drama to pull focus.
A crack team of six editors, including Gomis himself, keep the pace both buoyant and agitated, conveying that breathless big-day energy of too many newly minted memories to hold all at once. A trio of cinematographers, including Gomis’s “Félicité” DP Céline Bozon, is similarly attuned to movement and the swelling and sinking moods of each occasion. Sometimes, the camera charges dizzily into the fray of busy dance scenes, at the wedding and memorial alike; sometimes, like Gloria, it hangs back on the observers’ bench.
Nour, meanwhile, has even more of a composite identity than her mother, owing to the influence of her French-Moroccan father Slimane (Samir Guesmi) — long separated from Gloria, with the scars of their relationship subtly but potently traced in brittle, beautifully written conversation scenes at the wedding, in which loaded ellipses say as much as the sometimes cutting dialogue.
From Nour’s minimalist Chanel wedding gown to the ivory linen-draped table settings to a late, drunken mass singalong to the Fugees version of “Killing Me Softly,” the westernised wedding celebrations are a far cry from the anciently tribal memorial proceedings, with their many rounds of traditional dancing, ritualised anointment of wooden idols representing the dead, and general accommodation made for the spiritual presence of long-deceased antecedents.
But as these two long days (and nights) unfold in parallel, a vivid, complicated picture of community emerges between them — fractured all over by geographical distance, social alienation and fading personal memory, but binding a large spread of family members with a collective sense of belonging, or mutual not-belonging, or both as the mood takes them. Gomis’s whirling, incandescent emotional epic avoids pat, sentimental homilies about family, identity or saudade: In “Dao,” home isn’t just where the heart is, but where it’s been, and been broken, leaving a messy, international trail of fragments.