By choosing to bring the novel to the screen white dog by Romain Gary, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette suspected that she was tackling the biggest challenge of her career as a filmmaker. But when George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020, the director felt that the weight of this challenge had just increased considerably. “I already knew that adapting white dog was a risk. But this event made me realize how important it was,” she says.
Autobiographical novel written by French author Romain Gary in the late 1960s, white dog transports us to Los Angeles in 1968, when race riots break out across the United States following the assassination of Martin Luther King. It is in this climate of racial tensions that Romain Gary (Denis Ménochet) and his wife, actress and activist Jean Seberg (Kacey Rohl), take in a lost dog. They will learn later that this docile and affectionate dog was trained to attack blacks.
Writing the screenplay Dog White was already well underway when the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum following the assassination of George Floyd in the spring of 2020. Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette and her co-screenwriter Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne were instantly traumatized.
“With Valérie, we needed a moment of perspective, remembers the director of The Goddess of Firefliesmet on Tuesday, the day before the premiere of white dogat the opening of the Cinémania Festival, Wednesday evening.
“We knew that the film was going to have current resonances but it is as if suddenly, we had an even greater responsibility. That’s when Trump said “unleash the dogs” on Black Lives Matter protesters in the streets. And we, in our film, we talk about the dogs that were sent after the slaves who fled on the plantations. It is tragically repetitive! I would say that after these events, it took me more courage to make the film.
Aware that her film relates the point of view of two white people (Roman Gary and Jean Seberg) on the fight against racism, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette insisted on working with two consultants from the Afro-descendant community – the filmmakers Maryse Legagneur and Will Prosper – to guide her in her approach to such sensitive and delicate themes.
“They never had a moralizing gaze, specifies Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette. They were just there to point out my blind spots and ask me the right questions. As a white woman, there are things I cannot know. It’s confronting and it adds a layer of doubt. And when you make a film, you just have that, doubts… In the end, I think the film is better because they were there.
white privilege
Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette fell in love with the novel white dog about ten years ago while she was shooting her film Insha’Allah. It was screenwriter Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne who gave her a copy of the book, suspecting that this story would appeal to the filmmaker involved in her.
“Reading it, I didn’t immediately think of making a film out of it, admits Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette. It wasn’t until a few years later, thinking about it, that I said to myself that there would really be material to update the subject and make a modern film of 2022. What tempted me was to pose this question as a privileged white: how do I get involved in a struggle that is not mine and that touches and upsets me? Do I belong in this? And if so, what is this place? In the film, the characters of Romain and Jean are each committed in their own way to the fight against racism. They do it with a good will but also with a certain awkwardness.
French actor Denis Ménochet was also plagued by doubts during the filming of white dog, which took place in the midst of a pandemic, in Montreal and Vancouver. In his case, it was rather the challenge of embodying Romain Gary on the screen that he found heavy to bear.
“Romain Gary is like a Rubik’s Cube that I never managed to finish,” he said in an interview. Because it has too many different facets. He has a public persona, another persona when he writes, and sometimes under other names. He has lived several thousand lifetimes in one. It’s like a sphinx. He is quite inscrutable. I based myself more on a form of sincerity to embody it rather than trying to imitate it. But it still remains an enigma for me.
white dog is presented Wednesday evening at the opening of the Cinémania Festival and hits theaters November 9 across Quebec.