WRESTLING GROUNDS, 2006

Directed by Cheikh A. Ndiaye From Senegal
Starring: / don't know their names

sez says: What a mixed bag we have here!  This film was running parallel srories 1) about a street kid who had made many bad mistakes but who looked like he was trying to get his life together and 2) a wealthy young man who discovers Wrestling and embraces it as a way to find his manhood and to engage the traditional culture of his people.  The structure seemed to suggest that some events or another would bring these two young men together ... but that isn't what happened.  Indeed, it is not clear what happened. The two stores went along for awhile --but then a lot of extraneous events started happening --the connection of some event to the story as a whole was not at all clear...and finally..after the 'big event'  the loser seems happier than the winner and you can only guess why that is the case (maybe it is that participation -- not the winning or losing -- is what matters. That is my guess as to what the point is suppose to be - but it is only a guess)  And at the end the street kid is chased down the street for having won a bet .. but it seemed that is an earlier scene that he had promised his girlfriend that he would change his bet.  Regardless, it certainly didn't wrap up his part of the story.   Confusion was the end result of watching this movie --and yet, as off-putting as that sounds, I am still delighted to have seen the film-- it is full of beautiful, really really beautiful young men (it is nothing if it is not homoerotic) and it provides a look at Senegal which is not something you gt to see very often. And the acting was quite good. But not to be too cheerful about those aspects it should also be mentioned that the film is sometimes too dark to make out individuals and the depiction of women is abysmal. GRADE D+