In 2020, Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Isabel Wilkerson published an essay on caste systems (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent) which explain both the segregation of African-Americans, the Holocaust and inequalities in Indian society. Published a few months after the murder of George Floyd, the book remained on the bestseller lists in the United States for several months.
The American Ava DuVernay created an extremely ambitious fiction film on the theme of discrimination. The author-filmmaker made Isabel Wilkerson the central character of her film (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). She was as interested in the theories of the journalist and essayist as in her private life and the successive bereavements she experienced.
Origin begins with a disturbing reconstruction of the night when 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down in a residential neighborhood, for no other reason than he was black in a gun-crazed country. The filmmaker decided to broadcast the real calls that were made to 911 by Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, a paranoid neighbor. This absurd death in some way marked the beginning of the #BlackLivesMatter movement according to Ava DuVernay, who showed the first images of her film to Trayvon Martin’s mother in order to obtain her approval.
The new film from the filmmaker Selma And 13th explores the subtle distinctions between systemic racism and systemic discrimination resulting from caste systems embedded in different societies.
The approximately 250 million descendants of Indian untouchables have the same skin color as the Brahmins who are considered traditionally superior to them, notes the character of Isabel in Origin. Can we talk about racism in this case?
To transform Isabel Wilkerson’s reflections into a fictional story, Ava DuVernay chose to set her film in different eras: notably at the time when Wilkerson was preparing her book, inspired by the neo-Nazi attack in Charlottesville, and in the 1930s, during Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and racial segregation in the United States.
PHOTO ATSUSHI NISHIJIMA, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Jon Bernthal and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in a scene from the film Origin
Inevitable parallels
Isabel Wilkerson’s theses are very convincing. Jim Crow laws in the United States served as the basis for the anti-Semitic legislative framework put in place by the IIIe Reich. “It happened, so it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say,” wrote the famous Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi. The parallels are also inevitable with what has been happening in recent years in the United States.
The demonstration of these theses by Ava DuVernay is, however, didactic. The parallel montage that she favored between the present and the past is clumsy and lacks fluidity. The choice to feature non-professional actors playing their own roles on screen causes breaks in tone. And the historical reconstructions are similar in their form to a dislocated succession of “Heritage Minutes”, supported by tearful and starched music.
There is a formal defect in Origin, a documentary-inspired fiction that doesn’t quite manage to choose sides or fulfill its promises. Certainly, this indictment against dehumanization is at times powerful. Unfortunately, the best intentions don’t always result in the best films.
Indoors
Biographical drama
Origin
Ava DuVernay
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash-Betts
2:21 a.m.