I had heard about this film from time to time but it never really came across my "feed" (if you will). I got HBO Max to watch
WW84 which turned out to be the worst money I've spent in a while, but it was redeemed because it contains a Turner Classic Movies section.
Aside from having titles like the
Lone Wolf And Cub series (at least several of them),
Chloe From 5 to 7,
Bicycle Thieves,
The Gold Rush, etc., there was
Black Girl finally coming through.
And at just 60 minutes run-time, how could I resist.
The movie, as the poster states, is about Diouna, a poor, young woman in Dakar, living in a shanty-town, who goes to work for a white French couple as a nanny for their children. But when she accompanies the family back to France she finds herself living in a sort of prison of subservience in their small apartment.
The movie is one of the more powerful studies of the legacy of White Colonialism and racial inequality that I've seen, to be honest. By reducing it to the story of this one woman and the one family that oppresses her, in a contemporary context (for 1966), what you see is the big picture through the eyes of how it harms and how much it harms an individual life. It humanizes the situation so much more than these broad-stroke films we so often see about it (In which there always has to be a sympathetic White character as well to act as avatar for the audience). It made me think a lot about the Democrats and how they suppress Progressivism in their party and continue, even in late 2020, to talk about "Incremental Change" and how that is the right way to do things, while the lives of millions of individuals continue to be ravaged by income inequality, racial inequality, and lack of real and equal opportunity in America. Like it's ok that entire generations suffer because
eventually we're gonna get there. Just not while it's going to effect
me. "Incremental Change" is just a subtle extension of White Colonialism and the maintenance of racial and economic inequality in America. And it led to a conversation this morning with a friend of mine who is African American about how so much of the kind of permissiveness toward racism comes from the inability of the white ruling class in America to even see the effects of their persistent colonialist attitudes. This whole notion that so many "good" whites have that equality already exists in this country, that "they" have all the rights that "we" have, and that they just need to "assimilate", and it's somehow on "them" that they haven't and that's why the police murder them in the street or they don't actually get to vote.
Yes, this movie led to all of that thought and more.
Because it's so personal, to be inside the head of a person who is oppressed. The film is actually much more subtle than most American films made about racial inequality and the long-term effects of White Colonialism, even though it's really not that subtle at all, which just goes to show how far off American attitudes about this topic are. For example, Diouana leaves her shantytown, where so many of the people who are actually from her city in Dakar live, to go seek work in the brand new, stark white, gleaming apartment buildings the White Colonialists have built for themselves. And she just looks up at the buildings, glaringly pristine to her even though they may be nothing amazing to us, as she has just left the doorless hut where she lives with her mother. When she rings a doorbell to ask for work, the moment the White woman inside sees her, she slams the door in her face.
And the relationship between Diouana and her "mistress" is just so awful but in such a real, non-cinematic way, such as the White woman complaining about having to make her own coffee one morning because Diouana is so "lazy" when Diouana is essentially their slave. Man, the way the White people (the family and their friends) talk about her while she's in the room, just assuming that she can't really understand them, even commenting that she understands how to respond more "instinctually... like an animal", it's just chilling and heartbreaking as Diouana talks to herself in her head - in perfect French - about how miserable she is. And of course, the White family can't fathom that she could be depressed because look at how good her life is with her clean dress and her high-heel shoes - which the "mistress" keeps insisting she take off - she must either be lazy or ill, which they repeatedly ask her about in their ignorance of how they have destroyed her spirit. God, the shoes thing alone, the way they are symbolic to Diouana of her dignity and the mistress makes her take them off every time she sees them.
Obviously, this was a
very thought-provoking film and it's material is handled, in my opinion, very deftly, with much more depth and elegance than most any film I can think of about this subject. It has so much humanity in such a small and intimate and short film and the ending I felt was especially powerful.
I really strongly encourage people to spend the hour to watch it if you haven't already.