Maangamizi is a colorful but cliche-ridden attempt at that most difficult of genres, allegory. The film tells the story of Samehe ( Swahili for `forgiveness') an African women who is a patient in a mental institution. She comes under the care of an African-American psychiatrist named Asira (Swahili for `anger'). Both women are enlightened and ultimately united by the mentoring spirit of Maangamizi (Swahili for `destruction'). Allegory is a particularly difficult construct in any artistic medium because it almost always requires the sacrifice of psychological verisimilitude in order to represent fully its abstractions. In film, the lack of depth and complexity in the portrayal of allegorical characters can often be overridden by the skillful use of visual techniques ( i.e. Kurosawa's Dreams ). Maangamizi, however, seems to be a film put together by a committee; although filled with stunning images, the work lacks a unifying vision, veering from the mystical to the didactic and back again without synthesis. There are significant gaps in exposition and plot as the writing moves from predictable to hackneyed to cliché. There are puzzling inconsistencies in the quality of the cinematography, and all too frequently the filmmaker resorts to a trite flashback tease to create the tension that a more skilled director would develop with imaginative camera work and solid written material. Maangamizi may have audience appeal because of its cultural and feminist concerns, but suffers from a fundamental lack of creativity and artistic control.
Review of Maangamizi: The Ancient One
