Black Venus (Vénus noire)

 

BLACK VENUS (Vénus noire)              C+                                                                           France  Belgium (164 mi)  2010  d:  Abdellatif Kechiche  

If you thought the final dinner sequence of Kechiche’s earlier film The Secret of the Grain (La graine et le mulet) (2007) was infuriating and overlong, to the point of almost ruining the picture, which previous to that was an extraordinarily intelligent and well acted piece of naturalistic filmmaking, then this film picks up where that one left off, as Kechiche has taken a wretchedly abusive early 19th century historical example of European racism that is utterly appalling in the opening five minutes and extends this exact same theme for nearly three hours, just becoming a bleaker and more miserable, anti-humanist portrait.  From the start, the scientific introduction of what is at the time perceived to be a newly discovered species of human being from Africa, supposedly a direct link to the apes, along with monkeys and baboons, takes on a peculiar interest in the civilized European society, where the continued taunts and racist derision from whites leave an exasperatingly horrific picture of colonialist mentality, one that uses science to justify their own racial superiority.  Watching this is as uncomfortable as one can imagine being in a theater all year, but it is a project of love and meticulous documentation by this director, an unforgettable experience, a historical recreation of the life of Saartjes Baartman, an oversized black woman from South Africa, particularly her pronounced breasts and buttocks, who heads a carnival act of the wild and the grotesque, a kind of King Kong exhibit of taming the wild beasts of Africa on display in 1810 – 1815 for all to see, moving from London to Paris. 

What is particularly debasing is the manner in which she is exploited, treating her like a freak of nature, continually making her appear primitive and subhuman, subject to mocking laughs and contemptuous catcalls, allowing people to touch her buttocks to prove she’s real.  Baartman, played by Cuban nonprofessional Yahima Torrès, says very little in this film, never raising her voice, instead offering a void of blank stares, drowning her sorrows by drinking excessively, as this is the only way she can block out the demeaning treatment.  Her white handler Hendrick (Andre Jacobs) supposedly captured her and brought her back from the depths of Africa, keeping her locked in a cage, using a whip to control her, releasing her in front of the audience while still on a chain, or so the routine goes, all designed to sell tickets, where Baartman grows tired of the reality.  Hendrick, however, is blind to her considerations, as she’s his cash cow, continually claiming it’s in her best interests to continue along in this manner as they’ll supposedly make a ton of money, sending her back out there to be humiliated once again.  In London, some abolitionists tried to legally shut down the show, claiming it was exploitive, that Baartman was an unwilling slave subjected to public mockery, where slavery had been abolished in England just a few years earlier, but her own testimony reveals that Hendrick discovered her as a domestic worker in South Africa, offering her a contract for exhibitions in Europe, sharing half the proceeds, where she agreed to perform as an actress pretending to be a native from the wilds of Africa.  

This is a relentless and punishing portrait of racist humiliation, where Hendrick sells the examination of her body to a group of French scientists in Paris, who measure her anatomy as if compiling statistics for a slave auction, but while undressed except for a loincloth, she refuses to let them examine her private parts which leads to an open rebellion on her part, an act that leads to a terrible beating and the parting of the waves with Hendrick, who is soon replaced by Olivier Gourmet as Réaux, the bear handler at the carnival, who continues to present the act in the same way, but to the aristocrats of French society in Paris who find this creature to their amusement, treating her like a sexual object they can toy and play with.  When it stops being fun and games, however, when the theatrical veil of artificiality is removed, they don’t like what they see, which is an utterly sad girl who’s led a deplorable life, who hasn’t had a moment of happiness since she was born, yet she is openly displayed half naked and exhibited as one of the wonders of the world.  When she refuses to continue to be treated like a whipped slave, Réaux brutally throws her to the wolves as well, where she spends the rest of her life as a dying and diseased prostitute, moving from the elegant brothels catering to the wealthy back into the streets where she eventually succumbs to pneumonia and venereal disease.  Even after her pitiful death, the exploitation continues, as Réaux sells her body to the French scientific community who dissect her like a frog, placing pieces of her in a jar, showing them in scientific demonstrations to help prove European racial superiority.  The intensely provocative, nightmarish experience is overly repetitive and exhausting, undermining its own effectiveness by becoming a dreary exposé, but it is a raw and graphic portrait of her continual mistreatment, shown with meticulous detail, where the director takes liberties in imagining her state of mind, as she left no evidence behind like a diary.  This near documentary film serves as a public exhibition of egregious colonialist abuse, where racist actions and intentions are often shrouded in the name of art, science, civilization and culture.

Pieces of Me (Des morceaux de moi)

PIECES OF ME (Des morceaux de moi)          C        
France  (89 mi)  2012  d:  Nolwenn Lemesle     Website            Trailer

This is a film that gives people the opportunity to see French actress Adèle Exarchopoulos in another film, as she is notable for being one of the leads in the Palme d’Or prize winning film Blue Is the Warmest Color (La Vie d'Adèle, Chapitr... (2013), where both lead actresses were also awarded Palme d’Or prizes alongside the film’s director, the first time that’s ever happened.  This is a much more traditional teen angst film, highly uneven, with signs the first time writer/director is in over her head, but it’s also a kind of audition or dress rehearsal for the suddenly infamous actress, and it may have been the role that got her the part, as the film has been released 6 month’s earlier in France than the Cannes prize winner.  Like kids with iPhones stuck to their hands, Exarchopoulos plays Erell, a young teenage girl that carries her video recorder with her at all times, that is constantly filming friends and family members without ever asking permission, and through this documentary lens the director attempts to recreate an alternate reality existing within the present, one that does not fade from memory or alter its shape over time, but represents, at least to Erell, a kind of ultimate truth.  Erell is in nearly every shot of the film, where her face is particularly camera friendly, though she’s always angry about having to live in a dead-end working-class town, believing she’s suffocating, where she hangs around with a group of boys, an oddball cast of eccentric characters reflective of the region, Gabin, Javier, and Fingers, mostly sitting around doing nothing, with one guy continually making up stories to impress others, while another thinks up ways to get back at a dog that bit off his finger, and yet another continually has designs on getting a tattoo. 

Into this world walks Sarah (Adélaïde Leroux), Erell’s older sister, now 6-months pregnant, arriving unexpectedly at the door with her husband in tow after not being heard from in more than four years.  The twist to the story is the contentious mother/daughter relationship between Erell and her terminally ill mother (Zabou Breitman) with MS, where Erell believes her mother is a tyrant, always ordering people around, and while she would like to spend more time with her mother, she’s always lying around in front of the TV.  In Erell’s eyes, her mother uses her illness is an excuse for just about everything, but it doesn’t excuse the hostility directed towards her, especially since she believes her mother has always favored her older sister.  Her father (Tchéky Karyo) is more easygoing and continually defends his wife, and while he realizes she can often make things difficult for people, he doesn’t believe she would intentionally be hurtful towards anyone.  Nonetheless, the strained emotions between them that are always on edge are exacerbated by Erell’s accusatory tones, where she’s always pointing her camera in her mother’s face, even when she’s in no mood, always getting a negative reaction, which generates continuous friction in the home, with Erell receiving the brunt of the negativity.  Since the mother can never get out of the house, all the activity inside the home has a claustrophobic feel where bodies and emotions are constantly bumping into one another.   

The original music by Ronan Maillard and Troy Von Balthazar (from Chokebore, an American indie band) sounds cheesy at times, actually cheapening the naturalistic flavor of the film, while at other times, when the guitarist is actually sitting there strumming as Erell and the boys are just sitting around, it couldn’t sound better. While it’s a fairly slight coming-of-age story that doesn’t really address the complexity of the mother’s illness, but instead uses the severity of the illness in storyline only, offering little sympathy for what she’s actually going through, where she has to constantly remind people how sick she is, a fact ignored by most of the characters, including the filmmaker.  Despite this major factor, the focus of the film shifts all sympathies toward the plight of Erell, ignoring her rather irresponsible point of view, literally blaming her mother for feeling and acting bad, as she is in complete denial throughout about her mother’s illness, making the stereotypical teen flight for freedom, in this case, feel rather hollow.  While France exports only the top tier of their films made each year, the bulk of their industry output produces more conventional and less inspiring efforts that only play in France.  Were it not for the name of Exarchopoulos, this all too familiar film would hold little interest abroad.     

Augustine

AUGUSTINE         B              

France  (101 mi)  2012  d:  Alice Winocour

Another strangely unsettling Victorian era mood piece, recalling Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (Arnold) (2011), where more is reflected in tone, unspoken thoughts, and atmospheric visualization than actually providing details or understandable information, written by the first time feature director, where she pulls a story from real life historical events, what little is known, and then reimagines how it might have all played out, finding feminist sentiments within her fictionalized storyline, while keeping her characters completely within their straightjacketed historical times.  What starts out as an 1890’s dissection of class divisions ends up as a bizarre study of sexual dominance.  The key choice here is the brilliant casting of Soko (singer) (aka Stéphanie Sokolinski), a popular singer in France playing the stricken patient Augustine, an illiterate housemaid serving a wealthy aristocratic family, who suffers an epileptic seizure that causes panic at an evening dinner party, where one of the female hosts rather indelicately throws a pitcher of water in her face.  Partially paralyzed afterwards and something of an embarrassment, she’s immediately shuffled off to Salpêtrière Hospital, a sanitarium where the all-male physician staff treats exclusively female patients, where there were as many as 3000 female patients under the care of the chief resident, Jean-Martin Charcot (Vincent Lindon), where he worked and taught for 33 years, drawing students from all over Europe to learn from him.  His neurological studies predate the field of psychiatry, where the distress suffered by these women was commonly called hysteria, which amounted to seizures and violent sexual fits, both mental and physical disorders that he believed to be an organic condition brought on by trauma, where in the 16th century these women would have been condemned as witches.  To the casual observer, most of the patients were more likely suffering mental disorders, where the hospital was a giant storage grounds housing afflicted women.

When Augustine suffers another seizure on the grounds, she catches the eye of Charcot, not really her medical affliction, but her irrepressible beauty, where in his mind she can become his prized patient arousing interest within the medical profession, as currently the financial operations has a hard time providing enough meat for all the patients.  From the start, an ethically and emotionally complicated relationship develops between doctor and patient, where like a dog and pony show, Charcot shows off Augustine as his cash cow, literally staging her in front of other physicians allowing them to examine her in a state of undress, poking and prodding her like a medical specimen, reminiscent of Abdellatif Kechiche’s Black Venus (Vénus noire) (2010), another historical film obsessed with the naked female anatomy, where sex in the scientific community is never spoken or admitted to, but everything is explained and justified in detailed scientific vernacular.  “You use big words to say simple things,” Augustine tells him, responding to the routine of undressing in front of Charcot, an act of debased brutality and horror if he’s not there, taking a certain pleasure in pleasing him when he is.  Everything has a sexual context for her, though it’s all expressed silently in facial expressions and body movements, as she rarely utters a word.  What we don’t realize initially, of course, is the underlying sexual subtext for the treating doctor, who goes about his business in a thoroughly detached examination process where everything is expressed clinically, all an act to cover up his inner sexual tensions, as he’s more than a little obsessed by this remarkable young woman. The film ignores addressing the medical question of male hysteria while allowing it to dominate the physician’s thoughts throughout, becoming a power play of restraint and social manners, where sex is an unseen force overwhelming everyone’s controlled and orderly lives, where in the picture of restraint, Augustine and Charcot take endless walks in a suffocating fog.

Chiara Mastroianni plays Charcot’s independently wealthy wife, a woman of influence, and certainly capable of seeing through him, though she maintains a respectable distance, never interfering in his profession.  It’s her connections initially that lure highly influential physicians to visit Charcot’s medical exhibitions, which play out as pure theater before a leering male audience, inducing Augustine into a submissive state through hypnosis, resembling an exorcism, as she is quickly inhabited by her fit of hysteria, expressing sexual gyrations through fiercely uncontrolled bodily movements, where her physical contortions resemble the paranormal visits to Barbara Hershey in The Entity (1982).  Charcot hopes to release the disease’s hold over the patient’s otherwise unexplained partial paralysis by simulating the condition, hoping she will simply snap out of it.  The presentation is a bit grotesque, a room filled with men holding invincible, seemingly God-like power over this defenseless woman, yet the men burst into sudden applause afterwords, obviously very pleased with themselves and lauding Charcot’s medical advancement, which produces little more than mere hope, as the paralysis remains.  Interestingly, over time, Augustine’s condition improves on its own, each time after a highly traumatic event, actually producing the effect the doctor was hoping for, but without a prestigious audience around to see it.  Charcot’s ethics are compromised when he sees signs of improvement, but chooses to ignore them during the most important event in his life, where he’s gathered the most influential team of academics and physicians in France. His career on the line and the funding of his neurology program at the hospital at stake, personal ambition takes precedence over everything else.  While all eyes are on him as well, the sleight of hand theatrical nature of hypnotically induced sexual hysteria has the power to persuade men’s souls.  Though she’s been an uneducated, culturally repressed, lower class woman, never given the time of day, Augustine is suddenly jettisoned into the spotlight, where these exhibitions have conditioned her to understand the power she holds over men, for the first time taking control over her own sexuality.  While the music is by Jocelyn Pook, who also scored Stanley Kubrick’s final film EYES WIDE SHUT (1999), the extraordinary finale is a building crescendo, set to the extravagantly transcendent music of Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten ARVO PÄRT - Cantus in memory of... (4:59), which in this film is nothing less than a liberating walk to freedom.