While the femme fatale remains underexplored in the African film context, it has been a stock character for centuries in storytelling and has existed since the beginning of cinema. In the classical noir era, male protagonists were confronted by elusive, beautiful women who lured them into dangerous traps.
Perhaps the best description of the femme fatale is by the 19th-century French novelist and art critic Joris-Karl Huysmans. Referring to the Biblical character Salome, Huysmans writes: “She was now revealed in a sense as the symbolic incarnation of world-old vice, the goddess of immortal hysteria, the curse of beauty supreme above all other beauties… a monstrous beast of the apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning.”
For Mata Hari, the Nairobi 48-hour film project 2024 winner directed by Calvin Oyula and produced by Amos Cheruiyot, the ‘monstrous beast of the apocalypse’ is Delilah played with gravitas by Ramona Njeri.
The eponymous title is no coincidence; it pays homage to the 19th-century Dutch exotic dancer Mata Hari, popularly regarded as the real-life matriarch of the femme fatale. Born Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod, she was accused of using her powers of seduction to spy for the Germans during World War I. She would be executed in 1917 by a firing squad in France.
In the 7-minute short, the femme fatale Delilah seduces Daniel, her therapist, into killing her mentally ill husband. What’s her motivation? She fell in love with Daniel (played by Charles Otieno), or maybe it’s something else – we’re not entirely sure by the end of the film. I don’t imagine it would be possible to fully flesh out a femme fatale in 7 minutes. Daniel’s motivation for becoming the hand of death is rather straightforward. “I was trapped in her empire,” he says.
Mata Hari quickly establishes entrapment as a motif. We see it in the tightly framed shots and the extreme closeups. Daniel is trapped by Delilah’s seductive snare, while Delilah is trapped in a presumably cold marriage with a husband who, according to her, refuses mental healthcare. However, the film doesn’t quite explore mental health beyond its use as the plot setup and in the expository dialogue. We barely even see Delilah’s husband except for a quick glimpse when the therapist swiftly ends his life with a poisonous injection.
While Mata Hari doesn’t have any particularly distinctive Kenyan take on the fame fatale, you cannot miss its local aesthetics in the visuals and the dialogue. The innovative, minimalist but stylish dark cinematography is by far the winning aspect of this film. The desaturated, picturesque visuals are reminiscent of Sophia Coppola’s work. The ingenious framing is a masterpiece of photography. You could pose at any point in the film and it would stand as an amazing photograph on its own. The muted palette reflects how the characters see and feel the world.
Using just framing and deliberate shot composition, the director does more than show us what the characters are feeling, he makes us feel it ourselves. Extreme close-ups reveal distress, while slow zooms underscore overwhelming emotions.
Mata Hari, however, is not without flaws. The most glaring one — which continues to plague most Kenyan films – is the dialogue. Bad dialogue tells you things you already know, like ‘I can’t believe this is happening, this thing that you are looking at, here it is’. In Mata Hari, we have the characters outrightly stating the theme or Daniel saying aloud everything he has done, is doing, or is about to do. This gives the film a sense of insecurity, as if doesn’t trust the audience to understand what’s going on. The exposition monologues and dialogue ultimately render the visual metaphors redundant. Good dialogue is revealing. When done well, the viewer is supposed to get more insight into who is speaking. You’re supposed to listen to a character talk and get a glimpse into who the character thinks they are and what they actually are. This makes the characters feel layered and lived in rather than empty archetypes.
These shortcomings, however, do little to dim the actors’ shine. Njeri has such a natural, magnetic camera presence it’s impossible to look away. She taps into the femme fatale essence with sultry charm and sensual vivacity. Her co-lead Otieno does an excellent job dramatising the conflicted lover-accomplice with such depth and vulnerability.
Mata Hari is a bold addition to the Kenyan film landscape and a powerful statement to the heights our local cinema can reach if we diversify our genres and experiment more with forms and techniques. The film won the 2024 Nairobi 48 Hour Film Project competition and will represent Kenya internationally at Filmapalooza International Film Festival in Seattle in March 2025, competing against over 130 films from around the world.
