100 Days of pure terror and love: A review

100 days is a love story and the scenes of violence in the film emerge, it is true, as a result of an absence of love. The absence of love only serves to emphasise Love itself, this very golden aspect of human life. Is it not true that what is not immediately visible, may be […]

100 days is a love story and the scenes of violence in the film emerge, it is true, as a result of an absence of love. The absence of love only serves to emphasise Love itself, this very golden aspect of human life. Is it not true that what is not immediately visible, may be just as present as the very elements which the eye can see? In this sense what we have here is  a love story, which also expands to embrace the young love of two happy youths. Shot in Rwanda and released in 2001, the film opens with Josette and Baptiste, walking in the green fields. They  are  young, Tutsi, fairly idealistic  and deeply in love,and the future looks bright. Josette is clearly the leading partner, and she easily steers the relationship, and her lover, who seems to wait hand and foot by her side,  is willing to go along with his rather intuitive  beloved. The green fields,and  deep  valleys seem to rejoice over this beautiful child – like love, which, unknown to the lovers, is just about to vanish beneath the umbrella of the genocide which will soon widen to cover the hilly and scenic land. Josette’s splendid dress points to  this love, and Baptiste’s joyful, almost boyish sprint through the fields, in search of Josette, is another bold echo of the affection shared by both. Then he offers to take her to Paris when he learns that the dress can be bought there. Their growing love which blossoms in the sunny fields of Kibuye, as well as within its lush valleys, is rudely cut short by the genocide, the very antithesis of love, which begins as soon as President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane is brought down on April 6, 1994.
In 96 minutes this film presents a number of gripping moments from the genocide, including its planning and execution. A terrible euphemism is often used in the film ‘we are going to clean the community,’ which refers to the planned elimination of the Tutsi. Insect and animal imagery are also deployed. For instance ‘Get rid of women and their baby rats’, ‘Here is an insect. Tutsi cockroach’ or ‘Don’t leave any rat for the future’. Then there is uplifting but solemn music, and this haunts just as an elegy would, and is used to support moments of great terror of which there are many in the film, or to simply carry the highly apocalyptic story forward. There is also a lot of silence in the film which underscores particular aspects of the narrative. Also, there is a powerful use of contrast in 100 days. For instance, the  polished UN military official who seeks to avert a bloodshed which the departure of UN troops symbolises, seems  to be more human, more realistically drawn, than  the howling militia which is keen on eliminating the terrified Tutsi. The farmer who is soon surrounded by the yelling mob, seems inches higher  than her assailants with her calm,careful observation of the approaching crowd. Then  she flees. Even when Josette’s father is brought to the ground in broad daylight by the Hutu militia, down there he seems nobler than his oppressors and he proceeds to ask  the latter not to humiliate him in the presence of his children. A lot of the elimination of Tutsis  occurs in dark places, while Josette’s walk to the waterfall with her baby, is made in brilliant sunshine. The scenes where she is seen with Baptiste are very radiant unforgettable  places too. On numerous occasions the Tutsis are always shown to be more refined than their oppresssors. The two girls who are raped by the Priest are sketched in noble delicate strokes much more than the Priest, whose white Priestly vestments do not endow him with much grace or dignity. At the end of the film it is seen that Josette who could joyfully look into Baptiste’s eyes, when the film started, can  hardly look at him directly, instead it’s something like a poor sideways glance that she can achieve. The use of contrast is a powerful element of technique, and it helps to drive the story forward.
The otherwise handsome features of the Tutsi are also presented as a basis for hate. In one of the scenes, they are described as coming from the north,as being ‘tall and thin, with ‘small noses and small heads’. It is all part of the hate ideology that was  mature and preponderant in 1994. Children are shown as being brought up to dislike the Tutsi. In this wise a child cynically declares towards the close of the  film ‘He  belongs in a pit latrine. Its natural, he was a Tutsi. Tutsis smell bad.’
Shortly after the opening scenes which spotlight Josette and Baptiste, we see Tutsi families, made up of men and women, being rounded up and beaten to death in the town of Kibuye, within which many of the scenes are set. Tutsi families gather in the night wondering what to do,and where they should flee, in the wake of the rising anti Tutsi feeling in the country . Several road blocks are set up,and all Tutsis are stopped and questioned. Later, the viewer sees Tutsi schoolboys hurriedly put together in a small room, and in a cold blooded manner, and even to the absolute shock of the yelling Hutu present, kerosene is poured into the room, and all the boys are burnt alive in the huge inferno that follows. Later in the film, a Hutu Priest rapes two Tutsi girls, one of whom is Josette mentioned earlier. She  is increasingly becoming a symbol of Rwanda which had great promise, but whose latent gifts are wrecked by the genocide. There is a great slaughter at the Church, where at one time a huge number of Tutsis are gathered. Following this event many Tutsis are buried in the nearby valley in their hundreds. The role of the UN  is briefly commented upon in a scene where a UN official  telephones headquarters that if he leaves the town  there would be a slaughter. But the UN insists that he has to leave, despite the consequences of this. He leaves. Towards the end of the film, Baptiste is presented as having undergone a metamorphosis. He is now a soldier with the Tutsi rebels and suddenly meets a pregnant Josette at the Church. He is shocked and speechless, and can hardly relate with her. But the old love seems to draw him to her, and she to him. It  is a complex moment for both of them. At the end of the film, she is delivered of a baby girl, for whom she has very little affection, because the baby is a product of rape. Her attachment to the child is largely biological, and she tries not to exhibit any emotional attachment to it, uttering the brief detached words ‘It’s not my baby. Please take the baby away.’ This, coming from a young lady  who earlier in the film expressed a powerful wish to raise a  family, is a moving turnaround. She now  goes to a waterfall, whose waters slowly turn red, and leaves the quiet baby there,giving the film an ending which is  just as powerful as its  quite romantic and enchanting beginning.