Farewell Amor: Coming Over

Farewell Amor is one cohesive film, but its tripartite structure also gives us three miniportraits. Each section has an intense focus on one member of the family and follows his or her individual point of view: first the father, Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine), then the daughter, Sylvia (Jayme Lawson), then the mother, Esther (Zainab Jah). They tell primarily the same story, covering the same time frame and happening in the same places, but, in Msangi’s cinematic poetics, the different perspectives make for variations on that story, variations that unsettle its narrative. In other words, part two and part three start where part one did but retell and replace events according to the unique behaviors, idiosyncrasies, and experiences of their protagonists. While the trilogy structure suggests a series of character studies, the film’s strengths are less straightforward than that might suggest, and rooted in the challenges of reconnection that call into question whether there was any kind of connection to begin with. “Do you love us?” Sylvia asks her father early on in the film. “And you left to make a life for us, right?” Walter answers quickly, almost too quickly, “Yes, of course.” But neither of them is so sure of the truth.

As a director, writer, and producer, Msangi has made shorts such as the oral-history film The Baba Project (2003), the thrilling Suspense (2011), and the comedy The Market King (2014), as well as a television series called The Agency (2009) and a web series, All My Friends Are Married (2014). Most relevantly, Farewell Amor comes on the heels of the 2016 short Farewell Meu Amor, which Msangi shot after The Market King received the Ousmane Sembène Award at the 2015 Zanzibar International Film Festival—the prize came with two thousand dollars to make another short, as well as the opportunity to premiere it at the festival’s next edition. Contrary to the form of the feature-length film, Farewell Meu Amor focuses only on the father and his emotional, sartorial, physical, and relational preparations for his family’s reunion. We don’t get to the airport, a recurring location that operates like a joint in Farewell Amor, articulating and connecting. We get only the buildup, making for a distinctly anxious tone, a raising of the possibility that what Walter (as the father is also named in the short) is getting ready for—reunion, family, celebration, oneness—will never arrive. One of the most indelible scenes is an early one: Walter looking at himself in the mirror, practicing his smiles for the reunion. Performing forced emotion, he is like an uncanny marionette, unsure of how to move his body and unsure of how he should feel. The Portuguese meu amor, “my love,” refers directly to the girlfriend Walter must say goodbye to, while the title of the feature, Farewell Amor, is more ambiguous about which or whose love exactly is the object of estrangement.

Narratively, Farewell Meu Amor is a precursor to the full-length film, which in some ways continues where the ten-minute short leaves off. The plots of both films were inspired by Msangi’s own family history. An uncle of hers came to the United States from Tanzania on a student visa with a plan to have his wife and children come later. While Farewell Amor realizes that plan cinematically, reality is thicker, more painful and bureaucratic. After years of visa applications and rejections, Msangi’s uncle died in late 2021, and the family’s dream was forever deferred. “Watching their struggle for so many years,” Msangi told filmmaker John Akomfrah in a Q&A published in January 2021, “I wanted to make the ‘what if?’ story.”

It is all three main characters, and not just the masculine one, who are caught in this chasm between pleasure and duty. They are embroiled in a sentimental fantasy of love as fulfillable through some straightforward familial requirement, a matter of paperwork by which they can arrive at a place of safety. But the rules aren’t set. “We don’t even know each other anymore, or ourselves,” Esther notes.

Throughout the three acts, director of photography Bruce Francis Cole’s visual language makes the bittersweetness of the reencounter look beautifully natural. Each shot is crisp: blue and red coloration, a playing with focus, scuffed walls, the iconic New York City cab yellow, textured shirts, the glow of a lamp, a Barack Obama calendar pinned to a wall, crosses everywhere. The home, which squeezes the three family members into a one-bedroom apartment, is filmed with such depth that in a single scene it feels like it could be three places at once. Accessories of comings and goings—doors and handbags and airports and vestibules and hallways and curtains and windows and boots and hats—play a notable part in the setting, tone, and atmosphere of Farewell Amor. And yet, as much as entering and exiting are gestured at, they are ultimately unrealized.