With a celebrated Mauritanian auteur Abdelrahmane Sissako at the helm and an evocative premise about Afro-Chinese romance in Guangzhou, Black Tea might seem like the type of movie China would want to support, especially given burgeoning Afro-Chinese ties amidst Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Surprisingly though, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is not among the film’s improbable quintet of producing nations. Instead, the five countries backing Black Tea include France, Mauritania, Luxembourg, Ivory Coast, and—in a rather ironic twist—Taiwan.
Perhaps never before have these five particular nations come together to produce a film, and this is among multiple reasons why Black Tea is unprecedented, and worth noting. However, that doesn’t mean Black Tea is a great movie from a narrative perspective; Sharknado was novel and noteworthy as well. While one can see Sissako’s languid style and skillful visuals at work, Black Tea has atrocious dialog and unintentionally amusing production choices that hint at the compromises and miscommunications that must’ve occurred amongst the film’s multinational backers. In fact, Black Tea has so many whiffs of PRC propaganda—like direct references to the Belt and Road Initiative—that it is worth examining as the newest flavor of Taiwan’s soft power failures, given the government-funded Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) was one of the film’s major producers.
A Jumble of Flavors
Black Tea begins in Ivory Coast, where an early thirties woman named Aya (Nina Mélo) is about to get married to an Ivorian man. However, she backs out at the last minute—and the movie cuts to show her working at a tea export business in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, having left Ivory Coast behind. It’s quickly evident that she has some chemistry with Cai (Chang Han), the 45 year old Chinese shop owner. What ensues is a slow-burn exploration of not just Aya and Cai’s relationship, but various varieties of romance and family baggage that secondary characters embody in contrast with or complement to Aya and Cai’s connection.
As other critics have noted, one sees hints of Wong Kar-wai in both cinematographic style and the evocative exploration of fleeting human connections. However, there are perhaps too many “flavors” of connection that Black Tea cycles through. The film contains a random aside about an Ethiopian woman’s heartbreak, scenes of an Arabic-speaking merchant buying lingerie, a backstory and side quest for Cai in Cape Verde, and a small hodgepodge of other secondary plotlines which probably satisfy various culture ministry bureaucrats’ requests for “diversity” but don’t give Black Tea a stronger story.
Kaohsiung-as-Guangzhou
What is notable and laudable about Black Tea though is that, given most of the film’s runtime occurs in what’s ostensibly Guangzhou’s “Chocolate City” (more on that later), it contains the largest amount of Mandarin dialog spoken by African actors of any movie that I’m aware of. After the opening scene in Ivory Coast, Aya’s dialog is 100% Mandarin; it’s fluid enough for native Mandarin-speakers to understand, with due credit to French actress Nina Mélo. Besides Aya, there are a bevy of other African characters who represent various African nationalities, and much of the time their lingua franca is Mandarin as well. It’s a living, breathing representation of the growth of China’s soft power in conjunction with its economic influence, funded by the Taiwanese taxpayer.
Alas, this is where the praise stops. While the African actors in Black Tea speak Mandarin well, any Chinese or Taiwanese person would notice an uncanny valley to the film’s setting. First off, almost every “Chinese” character in the movie speaks Taiwanese Mandarin, and is played by a Taiwanese actor. There is no Cantonese spoken, nor any attempt to speak with PRC standard putonghua. Second, the movie is very obviously not filmed in Guangzhou, but rather in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Besides some rudimentary attempts at mainland Chinese signage, the street settings are obviously Taiwanese, and traditional Chinese characters leak through regularly.
Other attempts at verisimilitude—like clothing Taiwanese actors in PRC police uniforms—come off as uncanny, as if China invaded Taiwan and started stationing its cops at night markets. What’s even more laughable is how, in an attempt to show Kaohsiung-as-Guangzhou’s “oriental-ness”, the movie shows its night market street scenes swathed in red lanterns. Perhaps one of the film’s European backers saw Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern and said “I want lanterns for this movie too”, without realizing that no modern Chinese city lines its streets, outside of tourist districts, with red lanterns on a regular basis.
Taiwanese Taxpayer-funded Chinese Propaganda?
The folks at TAICCA may argue that, by using its funding to shoot Black Tea with Taiwanese actors and shipping in a bunch of foreign talent to film in Taiwan, it stimulated Taiwan’s creative industries and economy. That’s a fair point, but one wonders whether TAICCA could’ve funded a film that not only did that, but also showcased Taiwan as… well… Taiwan.
Yes, Black Tea is not the first example of Taiwanese government entities helping a foreign production (think of Lucy, or the more recent Weekend in Taipei), only to get amateurish storylines that barely boost awareness of Taiwan’s existence or offer anything beyond a surface level look at Taiwan’s culture. However, it probably is the first instance of a movie funded in part by Taiwanese tax dollars that, whether purposefully or not, ends up boosting the PRC’s soft power. Not only does Black Tea demonstrate the appeal of both “traditional” Chinese culture and China as an appealing multicultural melting pot of commerce, but it also literally contains dialog about how “we are building a Belt and Road”, as if lifted straight from a Xi Jinping speech.
Thus, perhaps the only people who might be pleased with Black Tea are the Wolf Warriors at China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or perhaps functionaries at the Taiwan Affairs Office. For both cinephiles and Taiwanese taxpayers though, Black Tea will likely disappoint as a mere shadow of Abdelrahmane Sissako’s 2014 awards darling Timbuktu. This is quite a pity, given there are probably so many interesting untold stories about Afro-Chinese relations that a director of Sissako’s caliber could’ve helped elevate.
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Black Tea (Chinese: 以愛之茗, French: La Colline Parfumée)–Taiwan, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, France, Luxembourg. Dialog in Mandarin Chinese, French. Directed by Abderrahmane Sissako. First released February 28, 2024 at the Berlin International Film Festival. Running time 1h 49m. Starring Nina Melo, Chang Han, Wu Ke-Xi.