‘Black Tea’ Review: Abderrahmane Sissako’s Cross-Cultural Love Story is a Disappointingly Weak Brew
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic Tea can be an energizer or a sedative. “Black Tea,” the first film in a decade from veteran Mauritanian auteur Abderrahmane Sissako, sips exclusively from the latter end of the shelf, passing through chamomile-type calm into outright soporific territory.
And if that seems a trite metaphor related to the beverage, this tepid Berlinale competition entry has plenty more of its own: A love story between a Chinese tea-shop owner and an Ivory Coast émigré that is rooted in the rituals of brewing and consuming the blessed leaves, the film aims for woozy sensualism but falls way short on the ambient richness and X-factor chemistry required to sell such an essentially confected exercise.
It’s altogether a mystifying misstep from Sissako, typically a filmmaker of such formal and political vigor; by its close, the ten years separating “Black Tea” from 2014’s beautiful, shattering “Timbuktu” feel closer to an eon.
Though this multinational production has already locked down an imminent release in Sissako’s adoptive country of France — where “Timbuktu” premiered at Cannes and reigned over the Césars in its year — it’s hard to see arthouse distributors in other territories flocking to a significantly less consequential affair, which oddly holds back on the sensory spectacle you might expect from a film seeking to do for mountain oolong what “The Taste of Things” did for baked Alaska.
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