Nolita Cinema, Nexus Factory present Lucien Jean-Baptiste (Paul Aloka), Aissa Maiga (Salimatu), Sali for short, Zabou Breitman (Claira Mallet), Vincent Elbaz (Manu), Michel Jonasz (Mr. Vidal), Naidra Ayadi (Anna), Marie Philomene Nga (Mamita). Director of Photography, Colin Wondersman; Director, Lucien Jean-Baptiste; Produced by Tierry Ardisson, Sylvain Goldberg, Adrian Politowski, Nadia Khamlichi; Screenplay by Lucien Jean-Baptiste, Marie Francoise Colombani; Executive Producers, Little Mountain Pictures (Belgium); Director of Production, Luc Martinage. © 2016
He Even Has Your Eyes is a laff riot. A situation comedy runs amok into a feature film. Imagine an age when adoption is fashionable and in vogue. Caucasians adopting black kids like it’s going out of business. Negroids adopting Whites…Well, not prevalent among Blacks. Blacks and other cultures assume the Blacks do it not out of humanitarian reasons but for economic. He Even Has Your Eyes is about a Black family adoption of a White kid. My wife and I wanted to adopt a kid, Black kids, but we were presented White kid, and after sitting through all the training, my wife pulled out at last. I ask her why “He belongs to a White family.” She admits.
I recently adopted a dog from the Humane Society. Funny experience, I am telling you so. Peace, her name was, I say, “was” because Peace is dead now. Peace was a Beagle, a hunting dog. Agile, cuddling, aggressive, energetic, and snoopy. One can hardly keep Peace on a leach. Her original name from the center was Fern. But as I stepped outside the center, I named him Peace. When the center would call for Fern, no one could tell whose name was Fern. I thought I could appease my wife for naming her so in our beleaguered relationship and household. The name and the dog didn’t help either. Peace died, and we got divorced. Oh, don’t pity me. I’m a man, and I can handle divorce. It’s a commonplace occurrence in marriages these days. I’m not special. How many you have been through? I mean divorce. No, don’t guess.
Salimatu Aloka, Sali for short (Aissa Maiga), and her West Indian husband, Paul Aloka (Lucien Jean-Baptiste), adopt a White kid, a boy. They are both not sure if it was the right kid or race, but they still brought home the blue-eye Benjamin. I can’t bring myself to commenting on the couple’s decision to adopt, but they seem eager. There’s not enough reason besides. We saw them have a “celebration” at the movie opening scene. Of what sort? It could have been their wedding, I observe. The next time we saw Sali at her husband’s flower shop and shocked the hell out of Paul. She drops the bomb: “I got a called, it was them.”
“Them who?” Paul asks.
“Them.”
“It was them?
They both look at each other understandingly. The next scene is Sali and Paul sitting impatiently at the adoption center. A beautiful blond White woman calls them into the conference room and presents a blond, blue-eyed picture of a plump White boy. Few weeks old. They couldn’t say, “No!” And they end up adopting Benjamin and take him home. Claire Mallet, a White snob, has been against a Black family assuming blue blood, White. Pink White, I could say. It’s like the breaking of a dam—chaos to a comic proportion. You watch this film and will laugh out loud together with me, ‘cause it’s hilarious.
Sali and Paul and their best friend, Manu (Vincent Elbaz), are refurbishing their tight apartment. In a hurry before caseworkers come knocking for inspection. It is one of those European apartments with no turning space. An enlarged cubicle. From this point on, hilarious scene after hilarious scene ensues. Sali’s Muslim families can’t swallow the idea of a ‘Benjamin’ in their family. They had hoped on naming their grandson, Lamin, A Negroid, not a Caucasian. Sali’s father, Ousmane (Bass Dhem) stone-dead face counts the tasbir, looking the other way, is a scene that will crack you up. “Anyway, the child would never be my grandson.” He railed at one point. Watch him look at the baby in the crib. It’s like, “I want to murder you out of my family!” It a laughable and desperate scene.
Claire Mallet, Benjamin’s caseworker who had opposed a Black adoption of White kids, starts to get mischievous. Her visiting appointments to Sali and Paul’s home are erratic, with an intent to embarrass them or catch them doing something out of the way. After one of her visits, Sali comments, “I don’t trust her anyway.” Claire Mallet soon gets her day. Sali sort for a babysitter and the babysitter in the community got another help. The ‘another help’ was illegal. She ran into the police and couldn’t produce her papers. The baby was seized by the government and sent back to the center. Claire Mallet almost crowed. Looking at everybody, “You see, I told you so. You don’t trust THEM with a White kid.”
Benjamin goes on a hunger strike, and the center rushes him to the hospital.
Before the pandemonium sets in, one funny scene is when Manu is standing over Mamita, blaming her for the misfortune. See how Mamita cries her heart out for the blame. They had hardly not got over this when Sali comes running in from the stairs. “Benjamin is in the hospital! He refuses to eat!” “Well, I can’t let my godson starve! I am the godfather! Let’s move it!” Manu commands. Look, whatever you do, you must not miss the hospital scene in this movie. The shots in those scenes are pure French comedy cinema style. Or better yet, imagine a set of Jerry Lewis pulling some of his pranks in Rock-A-Bye Baby.
The entire Benjamin tribe, with Aloka leading, got into the convoy to the emergency hospital to see Benjamin. They could hardly fit in the cubicle of a car—a scene to be held. Manu hits a trash can by the roadside. The scene at the hospital is amok. Sali and her gang are running from door to door, floor to floor, and room to room. They run in the opposite direction with hospital security, tailing, the Adoption Center crew, the police force all after them. They sometimes collide; sometimes, Sali’s group blocks their access to a corridor. Finally, Sali, Paul, and Manu break into Benjamin’s room on the upper floor and prepare him emergency food. He is soon laughing and playing with his mama, Sali, while everyone outside the glass door looks on in exhilaration. The entire hospital scene is both the climax and most comic scenes.
The hospital officers, doctors, security officers, adoption center officers, Mallet in relief are all present watching Sali feeds Benjamin. That is enough sign and scene to indicate that Sali and Paul, no matter their color, don’t matter to a six-month-old White baby. At Benjamin’s one-year birthday party, the community and Sali’s once stone face father, in his Friday gown, who now become all teeth, dances with Benjamin.
Somebody once said about drama, “If you gonna make me cry, you damn well have to earn it.” Make me laugh until I fart and hold my sides like I am going out of the little oxygen in my to-do, like in this film. Let me laugh out loud like there’s no tomorrow like there are no bills in the mailbox to be paid on arrival.
My critical eyes aside, He Even Has Your Eyes will naturally catch your evening searching eyes. When Mamita (Marie Philomene Nga) checks out the scene, opens the door, and sees a little plum pink skin White baby in Paul’s arm. She runs back into the living room to her ever tasbir-counting husband. She couldn’t believe her eyes. Then back to the door to reassure herself. She indeed got a White grandson. The neighborhood gossip, the racial discrimination they’ll have to live with, and most people already calling Sali not the mother of Benjamin but a “nanny” are some of the frustrations present. Mamita is miserable.
Aissa Maiga had played the role of the African Doctor’s wife. It was Anne, her name in that movie. She has newly arrived from one of those former Belgium colonies, you bet Congo, to join her husband, Marc Zinga, the African Doctor. In that movie, Aissa spent most of her time in Belgium, away from her husband and kids. “Suburb bored and bothered her,” she laments at the time. Here, she’s working as the stay-home mom for Paul’s time in their flower shop. Aissa hasn’t got over how Paul had hugged Claire the first time they met in the lobby. That, plus her nosiness, brought her to gut-hate Claire Mallet. Claire Mallet also hates the Aloka family for the adoption; she’s prejudiced. But comes full circle in the end, though.
Manu (Vincent Elbaz), a Parisian by birth, is a beautiful sidekick to this comic drama. He works in his draws, his underwear at the Aloka family home. Do Europeans behave so? Manu is one of those who don’t care whether they become millionaires or not. “F**k, it is in OUR stars!” He lives in the present and enjoys the good things in life; his wine drinking and smoking are unbound. In one of the movie’s low points, an emotional scene, Manu sits Benjamin, already his godson, up in the crib. And says to him, in a solemn voice, “ I would have loved to have her too.” Meaning Sali. In 1997, Vincent made a splash into the movie world with, Would I Lie To You? He steals the show in this movie.
Another part of this film you can take to bed laughing is Sali and her mother’s end scenes. Observe the looks on their faces:
“Now that all is well that ends well, we should talk about circumcision.”
Sali hardly knows what her mother is talking about, so she turns to the camera and yells:
“Paul!”
The film ends on a similar happy but funny note; like Namaste Wahala, another rom-com laugh riot ends. When Meera (Sujata Sehgal), the mother asks the would-be Nigerian father-in-law Ernest (Richard Mofe-Damijo) for a bride price. “I was expecting to ask you for my bride price.”
You can surely get your money’s worth from this film. It is hilarious, I tell ya!
Note: Dear reader the dog and my marriage issues are all made up fictions. Creative loafing.