“How can you kill an imaginary beast?” But what if the survival of your people and their culture depends on your doing just that?
The Red God, the God of Vengeance, is cursing them with drought, the elders of a Kenyan Masai village believe. The death of their war chief means that adolescent boys will have to take up the mission to bring about the rains. It will be their test, as the drought itself is a test; to achieve maturity, the teenaged boys will journey far by foot in order to find and slay Vitchua, the gigantic lion of legend. Merono, one of the boys, does not return; he, the bravest, confronts Vitchua and executes the killing deed at the cost of his life—or at least this is the new legend which the boys bring back with the lion’s mane. “Each time it rains,” Merono’s father, I believe, says, “we will think of Merono’s bravery.”
Like Saving Private Ryan (1998), this is a boys’ adventure; but Massai—Les guerriers de la pluie is an infinitely more interesting and compelling one. From France, the film was made in Kenya with Kenyan nonprofessionals populating the cast. A dialect of Maa is the spoken language. The director, Pascal Plisson, previously made Nature documentaries, and indeed some of the film’s finest shots integrate the boys and wild animals, for instance, a string of elephants on the savannah. Throughout, the color cinematography by Manuel Teran is gorgeous and mysterious.
Visually, however, the film isn’t entirely successful. Pointless closeups, including tight closeups, mar rather than balance out the more apt and intricately composed long-shots.
I do not mind the slow motion and computer generated imagery that are applied to the great confrontation, especially as they question the reality of Vitchua and dramatically show the kids themselves passing into a legendary, possibly mythical realm. The warriors who return are not quite the same ones who left the village—or at least that is how the legend will go, for the sake of the next great drought and the next great battle.
Dennis Grunes 