Wallay (2017)

There's a moment somewhere in the middle of Wallay where you can feel the film losing its own thread. Not dramatically, not in a single scene, but gradually, like a conversation that started with a solid argument and drifted off into tangents before anyone noticed the original point had been abandoned. That's the frustrating thing. This is a film with genuine charm and a real sense of place, and it still manages to fumble the landing.

The setup is classic, almost archetypal. Ady is a teenager living in France who makes the monumentally stupid decision to steal money that was supposed to be sent to his family in Burkina Faso. His dad, understandably furious, ships him off to live with a strict uncle in the very country he's just robbed. The message is clear: go and see what you took from, and maybe grow up a bit in the process. Fine. I'm on board. That's a story worth telling.

And for a while, it delivers. The early sections in Burkina Faso are genuinely alive. The cinematography captures the Sahel landscape beautifully, all dust and light and wide open space, and the culture-clash comedy between Ady's Parisian sulkiness and the rhythms of rural life lands more often than not. You start to warm to the kid despite yourself, and you can see the shape of the redemption arc from miles away. Sometimes that's fine. Sometimes familiar is comfortable. The problem is that Wallay then decides to take a detour it never quite recovers from.

The subplot around the uncle's insistence on circumcision arrives and takes up a disproportionate amount of the film's attention. I understand there's cultural weight behind it, and I'm not saying the subject is off limits. But the way it's handled here feels clumsy, at times uncomfortably so, particularly in the scenes where it seems to be pushed on Ady without his knowledge or consent. It tips the uncle from "strict but well-meaning authority figure" into something harder to root for, and the film doesn't seem fully aware of the tension it's created. It reaches for drama without knowing what to do with it.

Then there's the ending, or rather the non-ending. Ady manoeuvres around the circumcision issue by selling some stolen gadgets (so, still dodgy), and then sort of accidentally saves his uncle's life during a crisis that his own behaviour partly caused. And for that, he gets a plane ticket home. Job done, apparently. The film gives him a vague, soft-focus sense of gratitude and calls it growth. But I didn't buy it. If a kid nicks money from his family, gets sent abroad to face consequences, and comes home having faced essentially none, what have we learned? The script mistakes proximity to hardship for actual change.

It reminded me a little of my issues with coming-of-age stories that mistake atmosphere for substance. I found Sugar Cane Alley (1983) did this kind of thing so much more honestly, putting its young protagonist through a genuinely transformative experience rather than a scenic detour. Wallay has the bones of something similar but the muscle isn't there.

What saves it from being a disappointment I'd dismiss outright is the visual storytelling and the genuine affection for its setting. Burkina Faso isn't a country that gets much screen time in world cinema, and there's real value in that alone. The landscapes, the community scenes, the small moments of daily life, these feel observed and authentic rather than performed for an outside audience. I appreciated that. I just wished the script had brought the same care to its characters as the camera brought to the countryside.

Three stars. Good ingredients, loosely assembled. Worth a watch if you're drawn to lesser-seen corners of world cinema, and I'd always encourage that kind of curiosity. But don't go in expecting a tightly argued moral fable, because Wallay starts one and wanders off before it can finish its own sentence.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2017  | Watched: 2025-06-01

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