Vénus noire by Abdellatif Kechiche

Abstract

mais on peut déjà prédire que le formidable Crime d’amour plaira autant aux amateurs de cinéma qu’au grand public. Mount Allison University (NB, Canada) Mark D. Lee KECHICHE, ABDELLATIF, réal. Vénus noire. Int. Yahima Torres, André Jacobs, Olivier Gourmet, François Marthouret. MK2, 2010. Abdellatif Kechiche, director of the acclaimed L’esquive and La graine et le mulet (winner of four Césars), brings to light the short, tragic life of Saartjie Baartman, a South African (Khoïsan) woman better known as the Hottentot Venus. Before dying in Paris in 1815, probably from complications related to venereal disease contracted while working as a prostitute, Baartman was displayed first by her Boer boss as a carnival attraction in London, and then by a ruthless French impresario who exposed her in sex shows for aristocratic Parisians. What made her spectacle-worthy was the large size of her derriere and her elongated labia, but her bosses also insisted she portray the half-animal halfhuman savage that played so effectively to the colonial imagination of the times. Once the novelty wears off (and as more of the public begins to question Baartman’s brutalization), her French manager becomes her pimp. After Baartman dies, he sells her body to renowned naturalist Georges Cuvier. While alive, Baartman never allowed Cuvier (presented perhaps as the worst of Baartman’s “handlers”) to examine her in the fully invasive way he demanded. We almost expect him to drool in a final scene where he finally get his hands on her cadaver, has a plaster cast made of it, then proceeds to excise her genitalia and her brain, which he stores in large glass jars for later viewing. Indeed, the film opens with Cuvier’s unveiling of the disturbingly life-like plaster cast and the circulation of Baartman’s vagina in the jar among science students crowded into an amphitheater of the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Except for final archival footage documenting the long-awaited return of Baartman’s remains to South Africa in 2002 for a national ceremony and burial, the viewer cannot escape the relentless exhibition of Baartman’s body for almost three hours. Needless to say, Vénus noire is an extremely difficult film to watch. How Kechiche directs first-time actress Yahima Torres to portray Baartman and how the role plays to viewers today seem to constitute the greatest part of the criticism— both negative and positive—that the film has received to date. It inevitably elicits intense emotions from the spectator, ranging from embarrassment and shame to anger and outrage. The anger and the outrage may well be directed at Kechiche for holding the viewer captive to a story and images that are ultimately sensationalist , voyeuristic, sadistic, inhumane, and so very close to being pornographic . Is Kechiche not simply reproducing the travesty by subjecting Torres to the same kind of objectification visited upon Baartman? Or is it that through Torres, Kechiche grants Baartman an agency that has not been allowed her in previous treatments of her story? What distinguishes the director Kechiche from Baartman’s managers? There is a scene in Vénus noire that renders such questioning even more complex. It is when an abolitionist group takes Baartman’s first boss Caezar to court because they mistakenly believe she is his unwilling, unpaid victim. She is Caezar’s slave, in other words, in a country where slavery has been outlawed. Under examination (yet again), Baartman tells the court not only that she is willing 372 FRENCH REVIEW 85.2 and paid; she is, she repeats several times, an actress. To my mind, Torres’s performance as Baartman makes this film a must-see, no matter how hard it is to watch. Even if it is “just a representation,” it is the spectators inside and outside the film, along with Kechiche himself, who are exposed to scrutiny under Baartman’s powerful gaze through the eyes of Torres in her shatteringly brilliant, courageous, and respectful performance as the black Venus. This is a film that can neither be easily dismissed nor easily praised; we can only try to talk about it, and that is why it should...