Portrait of Jason
By A. G. Sims
New York Film Festival 2025:
Gavagai
Ulrich Köhler, Germany/France, no distributor
A German director raised in Zaire by aid working parents, Ulrich Köhler has now made two films set in Africa, one in Cameroon and one in Senegal related to the long tail of colonialism and how it manifests in the interpersonal relations of the present. Each of those films is in some way about white saviors, and how even the best intentions to “save” can result in reproductions of the same conditions that warranted the saving in the first place—a möbius strip of white corrupting and white saving on and on, the same way, forever.
In his latest, Gavagai, a film within a film, Caroline (Nathalie Richard), a French director, shoots a radical reinterpretation of Euripides’ Medea, reimagining the play’s protagonist as a white woman refugee being persecuted by her husband Jason, who in this version is Senegalese. Actors Nourou (Jean-Christophe Folly) and Maja (Maren Eggert), who play Jason and Medea, have an affair during the film’s production on location in Senegal. Months later, the movie premieres at the Berlinale, and all of the relationships—between Nourou and Maja, the actors and the director, Nourou and the world at large—are remixed and power dynamics are shifted. In Senegal, Nourou has elite status, as a movie star but also as the owner of an EU passport. He’s a snob about wine and gets chippy when he has to wait too long for his personal driver, a local Senegalese man. However, when Nourou lands in Germany for the world premiere of his movie, he gets a jarring reminder that in a white world, his status is retractable.
Gavagai opens in Dakar in the middle of a chaotic movie set. Nourou’s Jason runs to a boat floating near the shore, demanding Maja’s Medea to let him see his children. But Caroline’s not happy with the child actors’ life jackets in the scene and yells cut. Somehow, Maja is accidentally knocked into the water in the process. A highlight of Gavagai is the way Köhler paints the realities of filmmaking and the tensions that arise between actors and the director, a contrast to the performed comradery on the red carpet when it’s time to sell the movie. It’s clear that Maja hates Caroline, and Caroline doesn’t think Maja is right for the part. At the worst moment, when her lead is having a tense FaceTime with her husband back home, Caroline interrupts to deliver scathing feedback: “I did not see Medea today. Medea is not bourgeois.” While Maja gets criticized, Nourou’s bougie vibe is received as charming. He tries to assert that he’s just like the rest of the Senegalese cast, but they know that’s not true. When another co-star, Aita (played by Anna Diakhere Thiandoum), overhears Nourou speaking Wolof with his father who’s an extra in the film, she’s pleasantly surprised and asks why he never mentioned that he speaks it.
Like a beat switch mid-song, Gavagai’s rhythm and tone change completely at the beginning of the second act, which fast-forwards to the film’s festival premiere weekend. Nourou has arrived in Germany and waits at the hotel for Maja. As he reaches for a joint, he’s stopped by a security guard who tells him he can’t smoke there. Nourou continues to search for a light anyway, and the security guard escalates the situation by asking for his ID. Nourou refuses and Maja arrives just in time to break up the argument. As they check-in to the hotel she’s harsh with the staff and requests to speak to the manager. Maja’s reaction is over-the-top to Nourou. He’s been here before and doesn’t want to call more attention to himself. But even after he goes up to his room, Maja stays at the reception counter arguing on his behalf until they agree to fire the offending security guard.
In addition to Medea, other literary masterpieces seem to have inspired Gavagai. Directly referenced in the film is James Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village,” which first appeared in the October 1953 issue of Harper’s Magazine, and in which Baldwin writes about the extended period of time he spent living in a friend’s chalet in a small Swiss village of about 600. When he arrived, everyone in the village acted as if they’d never seen a Black man before, and because of the location’s remoteness, Baldwin contends that they probably hadn’t. No one believed he was American because, in their worldview, Black people can only come from Africa, and they greeted him with a mix of wonder and fear, a perennial stranger in their village even once they got to know him. Despite not attributing any malice to it, Baldwin goes on to indict the naïveté that allows Europeans to be completely ignorant of the people their ancestors set out to conquer and convert many centuries ago. Because regardless of what they know, history is what it is, and Black people shoulder the heavy weight of white innocence. “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them,” he writes. There are echoes of Baldwin’s experience in Nourou’s. Though perspectives shift in the film, Köhler centralizes Nourou, zooming in on his increasing alienation and frustration in Germany, as Baldwin found himself in Switzerland.
At a press conference for Caroline’s Medea, Köhler lays bare his true feelings, taking the fictional movie director, and in effect, himself, to task for the clueless way she embarked on her project. Reporters question her motives and intentions, what the meaning is behind turning Medea on its head. Basically, they ask, is this for white people? Does casting Medea as white and her persecutors as Black enable them to empathize better with her situation? Caroline responds to the tension by saying, “Let me address the elephant in the room: I’m an old white woman.” This delusion of self-awareness doesn’t save her, however, and when all other defenses fail (including a misappropriated reference to Baldwin’s essay), she looks to Nourou for a lifeline, burdening him with defending her filmmaking choices. It’s worth noting that, in the press kit made available for Gavagai, Köhler acknowledges that part of this project is a “self-critical look at the abysses of your own actions: the over-burdened director, the well-meaning but embarrassingly acting white man and woman, the savior complex.” He also notes the connection to his earlier film, Sleeping Sickness (2011), which won him the Silver Bear at Berlin Film Festival, a movie set in Cameroon that sought to expose the gross exploitation of Europeans living and working in Africa. In a way, Gavagai is that film’s correction, a film about what happens when a European with good intentions tries to make a film set in Africa. These Matryoshka-esque films seek to question the inescapable racial hierarchies wrought by the violence and bloodshed of colonialism. But this film feels more like a bloodletting. The real anxiety at its heart belongs to Köhler, not Nourou. What he seems to be asking is: how is a white man to atone for all of this?
There’s both comedy and tragedy to Gavagai’s plotting and scenarios. Caroline’s version of Medea is obviously and comically not very good. The set design is cheap. The boat has plastic wings and is lined with a metallic fringe that could have been purchased from Party City. And her Medea wears horns that resemble Disney’s Maleficent. Gavagai culminates in a sequence where Nourou, Maja, and Caroline watch the film seated together in the audience of the Berlinale Palast. Nourou leaves in the middle of the screening and runs into the Polish security guard who harassed him. He attempts to apologize for him being fired, but it only leads to more anxiety. By the time he returns to the auditorium, he’s emotionally raw.
One of the major subplots of Gavagai is Nourou’s relationship with Maja, which becomes shaky once they leave Senegal. Their affair is much more complicated off set, and it’s unclear whether they will continue their romance, as Maja works with her ex-husband to coparent her daughter, Frieda, who is afraid to meet Nourou when he shows up to their flat unexpectedly. As the microaggressions pile up, Maja’s implicated too, which raises questions about Nourou’s relationship to whiteness and to Europe more broadly. He noticeably has few positive interactions there, no evidence of belonging, despite being European himself. Of course, racism is always disillusioning and out of the person on the receiving end’s control, but from the beginning it’s clear that this isn’t some grave sacrifice Nourou must make for a fulfilling, comfortable life. His family in Dakar is wealthy, and Dakar’s streets are much livelier and more exciting than the chilly Berlin that Patrick Orth, Köhler’s longtime cinematographer, depicts. Even Nourou’s dad points to the ways that he’s left his culture behind and traded his Senegalese passport for a European one. His situation is tragic, but there’s also a mysterious element of choice that goes unexplained.
In that way, Gavagai calls back to Dutchman, Amiri Baraka’s one-act play. In it, a Black man meets a white woman on the New York City subway who mocks and seduces him, clocking that he’s a familiar “type.” He falls for it, but when the teasing turns to a racist tirade, the young man responds violently, and is ultimately killed and tossed off the train. It’s an allegory that ends where it starts, with another Black man getting on the subway, the white woman approaching him, history doomed to repeat. Baraka’s fable would seem to caution against Nourou’s kind of self-negating assimilation, a metaphor turned literal: dying to be white. Köhler’s take doesn’t seem to draw such a definitive conclusion. He chooses to end his film with an extended sequence from the fictional Medea inside of it, a scene where the children get away instead of being murdered like in the original play. In the end, Köhler has it both ways, concluding on the possibility of freedom, while also suggesting that maybe freedom is just a fantasy.