They stare at the camera, looking sad, worried or defiant. Most of them are girls, women too. Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette shows us their faces in close-up, taken from the archives, in her adaptation of the novel by Romain Gary white dog.
Posted at 7:15 a.m.
These are the looks of black women, who have experienced segregation or the humiliation of new forms of slavery, who have felt revolt and rebellion rising within them, indignation and powerlessness too. They fix the objective and through it, they fix us. Dignified and imperturbable, determined or discouraged, with a question in your eyes: “What are you going to do? »
It’s the terrified gaze of a black teenager chased by two white teenagers, in 1968, in a field in Alabama. Who we will see on the screen a few minutes later, hanging from a tree, while we hear Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit, protest song beautiful and heartbreaking, inspired by the lynching of two African Americans in Indiana.
Southern trees bear a strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees… (“The southern trees bear strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots / Black bodies swaying in the southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplars…”)
Jean Seberg (Kacey Rohl) and Romain Gary (Denis Ménochet) go to the funeral of this teenager. Seberg has been a star of world cinema since being revealed in Joan of Arc by Otto Preminger, then in Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard. Gary, a former aviator and war hero, is the French consul in Los Angeles and has already won one of his two Goncourt prizes (for The roots of heavenin which the defense of elephants in Africa is a metaphor for the defense of human rights).
Jean Seberg offers her condolences to the teenager’s mother, who orders her to leave immediately. Leave us our struggle, that’s all we have left, the tearful mother told him. This scene is the pivot of the film. The one that distinguishes this privileged couple who live in a villa in the heights of LA from those with whom they show solidarity.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY SPHERE FILMS
scene of white dog
Martin Luther King has just been assassinated. The United States is on fire and blood. Jean Seberg is a civil rights activist alongside her lover, a member of the Black Panthers. Romain Gary hopes to save his marriage, which is falling apart before his eyes. He welcomes a German shepherd into his home, to please his young son, but discovers that this “white dog” has been trained to attack black people.
Since the days of the cotton plantations, these dogs have been bred to hunt Afro-descendants and suppress revolutions, those of Black Power and Black Lives Matter, those that are not televised, as Gil Scott-Heron said. in his famous song.
“He is racist, your dog. He must be killed, says Jean Seberg to her husband, 24 years her senior.
“So we kill all the racists?” And we eliminate all those who do not think like us? “, answers the writer, who has taken it into his head to save this dog, to convince himself that there is still hope for humanity.
We are not born racist, we become one. We should be able to be deprogrammed from it, in a way.
It’s Gary’s bet. And the essence of his novel. Which Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette echoes in this subtle, moving and poetic adaptation, which avoids the pitfalls of Manichaeism and self-righteous discourse, and asks questions as complex as they are fundamental.
How do we support a struggle that we know is right, but which is not strictly speaking our struggle? How do you become an ally of a cause without appropriating it? It is not because one is in good faith that one is right to make certain gestures. And it is not because one is right on the bottom that one is right on the form.
This is my country, reminds Jean Seberg, born in Iowa, to Romain Gary. She is the American exiled in Paris, returned to the United States, where he is only a representative of France, taking advantage of her diplomatic privileges. Rather, she uses her media privilege to highlight injustices, she says to her husband. Otherwise, the cameras wouldn’t be there.
The important thing, he replies not without paternalism, is the way things are done. And the problem, he adds, is that you always end up bringing everything back to yourself. Is it better to say nothing, to do nothing, and above all to write nothing, which is still what you know how to do best? she asks him, stung, lamenting his lack of courage. He’s not entirely wrong, she’s not entirely right. Nothing is all white or all black. Like this film, which raises more questions than it offers answers.
Black women who have no voice — including the mother of a murdered teenager — see movie star Jean Seberg speak for them on television. On the other hand, for fear of appropriating the voice of others, Romain Gary prefers to be silent. Is it through silence that he wishes to improve things? Is it by becoming a target of racists herself that Jean Seberg is most useful?
She will end up taking a step back and writing him a novel, white dog, from which Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette shot this fine and powerful feature film. A story on which the filmmaker has taken her own look, full of empathy and humanism, hope and optimism. Nevertheless.