Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette will have wondered about her right, like Blanche, to wear white dog on the screen. However, the question is not whether we have the right to take part in the fight of others. We must take part in the fight against injustice, because the fight against injustice is never someone else’s fight.
The question is rather how to go about it, since we cannot all play the same role in this fight. By choosing to bring the work of Romain Gary to the screen, Barbeau-Lavalette would necessarily have to offer us examples to avoid. There is indeed in this story a man and a woman of goodwill who are repelled by the fate of black Americans, but who have only a superficial idea of their condition. Not only are they white, but they are rich and privileged. They live in the hills of Beverly Hills, where the ghetto is out of reach. They have black servants. No wonder they make such poor choices about how to be helpful.
If we had wanted to give us examples to follow in this fight, we would have had to put aside the work of Romain Gary and look for them elsewhere. But we could have found some, both among celebrities and among ordinary people.
In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, on which opens white dog, President Johnson was helpful to the cause of blacks by signing the Civil Rights Act despite the risk that the Democratic Party would “lose the South”. A few years later, Judge Albert Malouf was helpful to the Aboriginal cause by granting the Crees the injunction they sought, despite the enormous risk he took that it would be overturned on appeal. We could also have told the story of well-known artists or, at the other end of the spectrum, modest nurses or obscure teachers, just as white as Gary and Seberg and who, on stage or in the ghetto, ran the “risk of love”, as Gary says at the end of the film. The difference is that they did it in a more useful way than the heroes of White dog.
Barbeau-Lavalette’s film is entirely legitimate, and perhaps it will be useful in the fight against injustice despite the failure of the ineffectual action it chronicles. After all, an example not to follow can also encourage action, but in a different way.