Waiting for Happiness

WAITING FOR HAPPINESS   ***1/2

Abderrahmane Sissako

2002

IDEA:  A variety of lives converge in a small Mauritanian port town.

BLURB:  The title of Abderrahmane Sissako’s 2002 film isn’t necessary to describe the endless state of expectancy its characters inhabit. In fact, it barely begins to convey the depth of their liminal circumstances, the various longings, disappointments, pleasures, and mundane rituals that fill their vacant hours like floating tumbleweeds. Their condition is less “waiting” or biding time than learning how to exist, in whatever way they can, in geographical and cultural suspension. Theirs are lives literally situated at a point of transit, in a place where globalized modernity passes through but doesn’t stay. Sissako, who creates delicate, plaintive rhythms out of the villagers’ quotidian routines with a camera that rarely moves, powerfully elicits a sense of their desultory idleness, the feeling of stagnation experienced by those who’ve been left in the margins of industrial progress. But for all its melancholy, and talk of mortality, Waiting for Happiness is infrequently depressing. Around and between its characters’ lamentations are scenes of startling vibrancy, moments in which bold colors, music, and the spirit of community work to communicate a vigor and even a contentedness that are beyond reproach. Modernity is not what these villagers need; in fact, as Sissako shows us, it’s modernity that has paradoxically caused their isolation. In the film’s lovely, final shift in perspective to its intrepid youngest character, Waiting for Happiness hands the torch (the light bulb?) to the next generation, physically stranded from its ancestors but carrying their wisdom over the threshold.