Recencies van critici

Kechiche's approach to the outrageous, at times nearly unwatchable material is so clinical and matter-of-fact that it all but precludes the possibility of feeling emotionally manipulated.

Kechiche seems to think he's like this genuinely forward-looking model of compassion, rescuing a real person from history. But when you lay your lead actress naked and immobile on a table and film a doctor shaving her pubic hair with a straight razor, for the sake of scene in which doctors shave the naked, immobile character's pubic hair with a straight razor... Well, what, finally, is the difference between you and them?

The New York Times's Manohla Dargisdismissed Black Venus as bad filmmaking, and from a technical standpoint, she's right. But the film's rendering of period sets and costumes with cruddy camerawork makes us aware that the film is a limited dramatic representation of real life. We don't just react to the fictional Saartjie's torments, but grow repulsed with the thought of how much worse her real suffering was. In this case, bad filmmaking is good.

It is the horror film of the year. Watching it at a NYFF press screening, I marvelled at scenes of Baartman being led out of a cage by a chain around the neck, menacing white audiences like a wild gorilla, dancing and doing the 19th-century version of the booty clap. Not since the Italian slavery epic Goodbye, Uncle Tom have there been scenes of such graphic racial and sexual exploitation in one movie.

Instead of mere pornographic delectation (after all, we see her suffering through some of these performances), I think Kechiche is challenging us to contemplate not only the mysteries behind Saartjie's behavior, but the slippery nature of public artistry. You may give of yourself completely to this kind of freak show, as she often did, but if she's merely there to confirm the belief systems of the period, what is such "artistry" worth, really, if it ends up stripping her of dignity altogether?

The material is fascinating and throws up ideas about the legacy of slavery in Europe, the many subtle forms that racism can take and the way people conquer their fears of otherness by resorting to aggression... But the film lacks any strong point to it... and any entry point under the skin of our tragic heroine. The frantic style of the editing and camera movement may give the impression of warmth, but Kechiche handles the material with hands that are ice cold.