‘Black Tea’ Review: Abderrahmane Sissako’s Evocative but Slippery Diasporic Drama

Part of reviewing films for trades like The Hollywood Reporter is to provide a clear and concise plot summary for the reader. But this task may prove particularly difficult for Black Tea — the first feature in nearly ten years from Mauritanian auteur Abderrahmane Sissako, whose powerful 2014 drama Timbuktu won several César awards and was nominated for a foreign-language Oscar.

Ostensibly, the story follows Aya (the graceful Nina Mélo), an African bride who dumps her groom at the wedding and flees to China, where she works in a tea shop and winds up having an affair with her seductive boss, Cai (Chang Han). But is that what really happens?

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The trailer, as well as the official synopsis, would lead you to think so. In reality, though, this completely enigmatic drama never offers up a succinct plotline, skipping from one character and story to another, jumping back and forth between countries and time periods, then ending with a twist à la M. Night Shyamalan (to be kind) or Dallas (to be less kind) that throws everything into question.

Not all movies need classic three-act structures, and some of the best ones do something different. The 62-year-old Sissako’s previous films, which also include the excellent Bamako and Waiting for Happiness, have never told traditional stories in the Hollywood sense. But in the best cases, such as his harrowing portrait of a village under siege in Timbuktu, they can leave extremely strong impressions, existing somewhere between reality and parable, or between folktale and chronicle of contemporary malaise.

This seems to be what the 62-year-old director was going for in Black Tea, which kicks off with Aya about to get married along with other couples in a group ceremony somewhere in Africa (the country is purposely unnamed, although the scene was shot in the Ivory Coast). But there’s a major hitch at the wedding: We learn that Aya’s future spouse (Franck Pycardhy) cheated on her the day beforehand, which explains why she decides to leave him standing at the altar.

She takes off in her wedding dress and, faster than you can say Wong Kar-Wai, she’s suddenly whisked away to a colorful nighttime street in Guangzhou, walking among lanterns and neon lights as a cover of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” blares on the soundtrack. There, she buys food at an outdoor market in an African neighborhood known locally as “Chocolate City,” where she seems to know all the vendors. She also speaks excellent Mandarin, which we hear much more of when she shows up at the gourmet tea shop run by the alluring and knowledgeable Cai.

Most directors would put up a “5 years later” title card to explain the transition, but Sissako deliberately leaves it out, and as the story progresses we start asking more and more questions. How did Aya wind up there? How did she get involved with her boss, who, each night, gives her erotically-charged lessons in the art of tea — not unlike Patrick Swayze showing Demi Moore how to do pottery in Ghost? And why are we now following Cai’s story, which involves a previous affair with a woman in Cape Verde that led his wife, Ying (Wu Ke-Xi), to divorce him? And what about all the African characters we meet in Chocolate City but never get to know because they keep popping in and out of the film so quickly?

Instead of taking us in, Black Tea gently pushes us away, even if the world depicted is certainly one worth exploring. Few people know about the African diaspora in China, and early on we catch glimpses of the different lives that people like Aya lead there. The expats seem to have formed their own tight-knit community of restaurants and hair salons, yet manage to blend in well with the locals, including a pair of cops who patrol the market each night and know everyone by their first name.

There’s almost a Short Cuts-style attempt to create an ensemble piece, but instead of following each character all the way through, Sissako seems to forget their story threads along the way. By the time the third act arrives, and Aya winds up stuck in Cai’s apartment as his racist father-in-law shows up with the rest of the family — this after we see him traveling to Cape Verde to meet his estranged daughter, whom we only learned about a few scenes beforehand — it’s hard to care whether Aya and Cai will ever make it as a couple.

Filled with polished neon-lit photography by Aymerick Pilarski, the film — which was shot mostly in Taiwan (both Chang Han and Wu Ke-Xi are Taiwanese) — is handsomely made, although the treacly score by Armand Amar (The Concert) subtracts from some of its classiness. During its best moments, such as the sequence in which Aya accompanies Cai to his lush tea plantation in the countryside, we experience the kind of soulful and evocative filmmaking that characterizes Sissako’s best work, transporting the viewer to a strange world with its owns set of rules. It’s too bad the rest of Black Tea fails to live up to that standard, taking an intriguing character like Aya to a fascinating place, only to lose us along the way.