The Tea Is Piping Hot
Olivier Marceny/Cinéfrance Studios/Archipel 35/Dune Vision
MOVIE REVIEW
Black Tea (2024)
What “Black Tea” should have been is an exploration of how an Ivorian woman is able to be herself only once she leaves home. But instead “Black Tea” is an interesting failure about the limits of the masculine imagination. It’s also a demonstration of the importance of structural consistency if you want an audience to stay with your characters. This is such a shame, because director Abderrahmane Sissako, who also cowrote the script, has a reputation for attentive movies about how people’s lives are shaped by global forces outside their control. But based on this movie, unfortunately he is also only a man. It’s really irritating when a movie misses its own point.
Aya (Nina Mélo, very good) astonishes everyone when she jilts her fiancé at the altar at a group wedding in Ivory Coast. When we next see her she has moved around the world to Guangzhou, China, happily settled into a nice apartment in the “Chocolate City” neighborhood and working in a tea shop owned by Cai (Chang Han). The shop is also staffed by his son Li-ben (Michael Chang) and a young woman named Wen (Huang Wei). Aya and Wen are friends; and Aya is also close with the cheerful Mei (Yu Pei-jen) who runs the luggage shop opposite. As shown here, and despite a heavy police presence, the black residents of the city are welcomed and treated normally, although it certainly helps that they all speak pretty good Mandarin. Aya is intrigued by every aspect of the tea shop and is being carefully taught the details of how to serve tea by Cai. This is not merely to assist with the international customers who frequent the shop. The conversations about the preparation of tea and the subtleties of the tea-drinking experience are as flagrant a metaphor for sex as anything shown on screen in some time. The chemistry being Ms. Mélo and Mr. Chang in these sequences is as smoking hot as possible in anything this understated, and all the more so for their connection being so unexpected – even Cai thinks Aya would prefer to date his son.
But as the relationship between Aya and Cai deepens, we learn some things about Cai that bring his ex-wife Ying (Wu Ke-xi) onto the scene; and this is where the movie goes off the rails. There’s an ill-advised sequence in Cape Verde that, while beautiful, is logically inconsistent and surprisingly boring. But it’s a jolly memory compared to the gruesomely heavy-handed dinner sequence in Cai’s apartment, during which Aya is literally locked in a bedroom while some capital-A acting about the evils of racism is done by the Chinese/Taiwanese actors. It’s harder to say who is worse served by that sequence. After that the final twist is only a groaning disappointment instead of the brutal shock it was aiming for.
The reason for this overall failure is because it’s very hard for men to imagine that a woman could find her own place in the world thanks to her own merits. What’s more, it’s even harder for them to imagine that a woman this independent might not care to be treated badly by the guy she’s dating no matter how hot he is. A movie about a woman immigrant from an African nation could be cheerful, friendly and empowering – whether or not it has a stereotypically happy ending – but that seems to be so radical as almost beyond imagining. It’s so disappointing that Mr. Sissako came so close to telling a fresh new story and yet missed the mark so completely.
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