Vague Visages’ Gavagai review contains minor spoilers. Ulrich Köhler’s 2025 movie features Jean-Christophe Folly, Maren Eggert and Nathalie Richard. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

When Gavagai director director Ulrich Köhler was asked directly by critic/programmer Mark Peranson about whether one of his movie’s central characters — a white, opinionated and controlling French woman making a movie in Senegal — was based on filmmaker Claire Denis, he said, “that was not the idea… it was more about me honestly.” I take that as more than a little bit of deflection on Köhler’s part because there’s such an uncanny amount of similarities that fit Denis to a T. Then again, the German director and a litany of other European filmmakers who have made movies in Africa could find something confrontational about themselves in Gavagai. The film centers around the final days of filming an adaptation of Euripides’ tragic tale Medea and the subsequent premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival. Throughout the 91-minute film, race and colonialism come to the forefront of discussions when the three central characters — actor Nourou Cissokho (Jean-Christophe Folly), actress Maja Tervooren (Maren Eggert) and director Caroline Lescot (Nathalie Richard) interact with one another and find themselves having to explain their film in social and political terms. Gavagai doesn’t break any new ground with its excavation of race in film and European art culture’s relationship to Africa, but Köhler interestingly addresses paradoxical problems within.

Race is a web of contradictions in Gavagai, and Köhler doesn’t try to flatten the topic and his characters down as all being on the same page. Nourou consistently finds his white friends trying to fight battles for him, most notably his co-star and lover Maja. During a hotel incident, in which a Polish security guard ask the male actor for his identification, Eggert’s character demands the man be fired for racial profiling. Meanwhile, Nourou just wants to go about his business without the fuss. The one chance Folly’s protagonist gets to voice his thoughts emerges during a press conference sequence, but he feels pressured to shoot down questions about the movie’s problematic racial dynamics by suggesting the inquiries concentrate on the film itself rather than the social or political implications. 

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In Gavagai, Köhler creates a dynamic relationship between a Black man’s racial profiling experiences in a predominantly white European city and the unnecessary hoisting of him as a martyr of Europe’s racism. Caroline’s film adaptation of Medea –– in which she makes Jason Senegalese and his wife Medea white and radically changes the ending to make the titular character not kill her children — functions as a modernist interpretation that mixes past and present. These scenes are the weakest in Köhler’s film and interrupt the drama rather than underline the racial dynamics occurring between Nourou and Maja. The insistence of the press to discuss the film’s social commentary turns out to be justified, arguably, because the movie itself, or rather the scenes featured in Gavagai, feel artistically empty and laborious.

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Gavagai’s meta-commentary on the way we, as an audience, interpret race in film (and carry it into real life) comes to a jolting point during a nerve-wracking travel sequence featuring Nourou and the aforementioned Polish security guard, who is accompanied by large and vaguely Eastern European colleagues. The protagonist intends to apologize for the firing and suggests that it wasn’t his intention, but — as the ride goes along — Köhler incorporates a menacing and cheeky twist, where the driver, who has all the looks of a James Bond villain, turns to Nourou and menacingly asks him what kind of guy he’d play in a movie. It’s a scene rife with contradiction and irony that’s nearly impossible to iron out completely, and that’s the point. 

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Gavagai is a quasi-interesting study of how race in film and race in real life are approached differently and feel different. For Nourou, it becomes clear that journalists’ obsession with racial dynamics in Caroline’s film aren’t as important to him as what he experiences in real life. There are no easy answers for the protagonist, and he is pressed in uncomfortable ways from all sides against his will. For Maja, however, both things seem easy to solve, as she sees both her film role as a guilty white woman and her ability to be Nourou’s savior as equally liberating progressive experiences. This is reflected quite clearly in the way her character of Medea in the film-within-the-film is also interpreted — a woman whose whiteness is one of both guilt and redemption. I imagine a lot of European filmmakers feel the same way when they take their cameras to Africa.

Soham Gadre (@SohamGadre) is a writer/filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. He has contributed to publications such as Bustle, Frameland and Film Inquiry. Soham is currently in production for his first short film. All of his film and writing work can be found at extrasensoryfilms.com.

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