The Lion Has Seven Heads

Rocha's film intends to demonstrate the contradictions of imperialism in Africa and to reveal the dynamics of the revolutionary process, of struggle against it. It is filmed theatre, self-consciously and confessedly Brechtian in its method. Seventy rather stilted, second-hand tableaux dramatise relations between a stereotypic blonde goddess (imperialism), a grotesquely posturing Léaud as Catholicism, the CIA, a black bourgeois reformist politician, and their opposition, a classic Ché figure, an African militant, and 'the people'. Very didactic and banally filmed, it tends toward a condescending populism, a rip-off analysis that doesn't seem to stem from a strong engagement with the subject, despite the clarity/accuracy of the general argument. The signs have no life. JDuC.