Review: Black Venus

Saartjie Baartman (Yahima Torres) does her 'savage dance' for a titillated group of French aristocrats.

Black Venus
Directed by: Abdellatif Kechiche
Starring: Yahima Torres, Andre Jacobs, Olivier Gourmet
Screening in: Melbourne International Film Festival

Black Venus is hard to watch. For one thing, it runs for nearly three hours. But more importantly, it confronts the viewer with the ugliness of colonialism. It doesn’t so much weave a narrative as compel its audience to bear witness; we watch so we will understand, and we will be diminished if we look away.

Yet we are complicit nonetheless. The idea of looking, of witnessing, is the film’s key motif, because Saartjie ’Sarah’ Baartman (Yahima Torres) was crushed by being the object of that gaze.

Born in what is now South Africa to a Khoisan (Bushman) family, Baartman was enslaved to a Dutch colonial farmer and gained fame in early 19th-century Europe as a freak-show exhibit known as “the Hottentot Venus”. After her death at 26, her body was sold to the French National Museum of Natural History, where eminent naturalist Georges Cuvier (François Marthouret) measured and autopsied her to suggest she was the missing link between apes and humans.

Baartman remained a public spectacle long after her death; her remains were on display in the museum until 1974. After much legal wrangling, they were repatriated to South Africa in 2002.

Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche shows, with vivid, unflinching immediacy, how white people exert racial supremacy by projecting ideas of animalistic sexuality onto black people’s bodies, accessing forbidden or taboo forms of sexual expression while claiming to be superior to them.

These attitudes permeated European society from the lowest carnivals to the highest echelons of Enlightenment science. The film crackles with spontaneous reaction shots from horrified yet titillated French aristocrats and working-class Londoners, showing how the impulses stirred by Baartman crossed lines of gender, class and nationality. Later, she disrobes for the detached but no less prurient gaze of scientists and artists.

But in also making viewers stare at Baartman, Kechiche suggests these same attitudes survive today. After all, hip-hop didn’t invent the cult of the booty; Baartman’s large buttocks were the key to her public appeal. Her performance costumes were skintight bodysuits, her dance routines involved shaking her junk, and audience members were invited to touch her butt.

Europeans were also fascinated by Baartman’s large labia; they were excised after her death and displayed in a jar of formaldehyde. Meanwhile today, women of all races are encouraged to find their natural genitalia freakish, and to submit to plastic surgery to achieve aesthetic ‘perfection’.

The abject degradation of Baartman’s life is shocking enough that I appreciate why Kechiche chose simply to show it… at great length. But in so doing, he denies Baartman agency once more – even if it is only the self-consciously artificial agency of the biopic protagonist to ‘tell her side of the story’. Her actual thoughts and opinions are unknown (she was illiterate and spoke only limited English and French), but we seem to have as little access to them as as the 19th-century audiences for whom she cavorted.

The film also repeatedly shows Baartman numbing her pain with nicotine and alcohol.

However, the film does grant Baartman integrity… even though it’s mainly so we can see it ground down by the whims of others. Early on, she objects to being manhandled, insisting she’s no harlot; when commanded to perform ‘primitive’ music, she instead sweetly sings and plays the violin; she refuses to display her genitals to assembled scientists.

To her first handler, the Afrikaner Hendrick Caezar (Andre Jacobs), these legitimate objections are childish tantrums. When he tires of Baartman and sells her to French bear trainer Réaux (Olivier Gourmet), she is treated as a wilful, disobedient animal, both onstage and off. And to Cuvier, she’s a specimen, an embodiment of a theory, rather than a person.

The only one who seems to treat Baartman kindly is the artist Jean-Baptiste Berré (Michel Gionti), who painted her at the museum. After her death, we see him sanding and painting a plaster cast of her body… but is it a tribute to the soul that inhabited it, or simply in the pursuit of artistic exactitude?

It’s this ambiguity that makes Black Venus so unrewarding. We are used to movies that take a moral stand, and this one does so only by suggestion. Lots of people walked out of the screening I attended – not just because of the often distressing scenes, but because there was no clear narrative progression, no character arc. Torres completely embodies this woman who was pigeonholed by her body, but her performance is as inscrutable as it’s visceral… a criticism that could apply to this entire film.

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