Il colore della pelle

I finally saw «I'll Spit on Your Graves» tonight and I cannot say it is a good movie... but it is a good movie! It is wonderfully trashy and sordid, yet it is truthful, direct, and daring even by today's standards, elegantly enhanced by Marc Fossard's black-and-white photography, Alain Goraguer's jazz score, and Michel Gast's direction.

Based on a novel by Boris Vian (who died on the opening night of a heart attack), it is one of those typical Northern stories about slightly light-skinned people, whom many call blacks, but go through life as whites. Joe Grant, the protagonist (Christian Marquand), is one of those people. In Memphis, his black brother Johnny is murdered for allegedly raping a white woman (in fact, they were lovers planning to get married). Joe's reaction is violent, he has an incendiary temperament, so he moves to another town, just as racist and virulent, where he looks for a way to avenge Johnny's death, seducing white women who, on several occasions, he is about to kill. However, Joe falls in love with the richest girl in town (the beautiful Antonella Lualdi) and tragedy...

What I find amazing is how director Gast decided to recreate places of the American South in France and got away with it, not because of the details, precision or elaboration of environments and sets, but because of the atmosphere he was able to create, a sensation of oppression and racism with a strong American seal, which I, for example, who am not white, could feel when entering the Panama Canal Zone, when it was under the regime of the United States Armed Forces. (Racism is better or only identified by or known to those of us who have experienced it).

«I'll Spit on Your Graves» is, for me, a very good industrial job, in which I do not find any pretense of making an art film, but rather of competing in the international film market with an effective product. The motion picture was successful everywhere, including Panama. I could not see it at the time, because I was 8 years old, but I heard people talk about it, because of its open frankness about sexuality. Despite all its flaws, I believe this film is a French classic on its own terms, an important piece in the evolution of French commercial cinema.

A French-made rumination of American racial tensions, circa the late 1950s, emerges a ludicrous attempt. A remarkable dissonance of plot, character and sentiment overwhelms practically every scene. The juxtaposition of French-language dialogue and the Continental performances are at odds with the subject matter, which focuses on a so-called "light-skinned" African-American, played by badly miscast lily-white Christian Marquand, who tries to fit in with a U.S. town overrun with racist bourgeois and a "Wild Racer"-type motorcycle gang that appear to have been imported from some American-International juvenile delinquency movie. The clashes of acting, stilted dialogue, a strange French version of Americana, and a plot that is meant to be social commentary but emerges as mild exploitation, result in an abject failure. A risque nude swimming scene is a surprise, and was probably the only reason this movie found its way into the international marketplace. A good jazz-infused music score is the singular plus here.

When his younger brother is lynched for dating a white woman in Memphis, Tennessee, a light-skinned African-American named "Joe Grant" (Christian Marquand) decides to relocate to a small Southern town to get his revenge on his own terms. More specifically, since his brother's murder was driven by the racist culture in the South during this particular time, his goal soon becomes to have sexual relations with as many local White women as he can. And as luck would have it, the small town he chooses just happens to have a number of young, sexually promiscuous women who soon fall head-over-heels for the new stranger that just arrived. One particular problem, however, is that all of these women just happen to have boyfriends who are members of a youth gang which pretty much controls everything in town--with their leader "Stan Walker" (Paul Guers) being especially ruthless. It should also be noted that Stan just happens to be engaged to an attractive young lady named "Lizbeth Shannon" (Antonella Lualdi) who lives in a large mansion just outside of town and comes from a rich, aristocratic family. To that effect, Lizbeth becomes Joe's prized sexual target. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this film was a French production, and because of that, it bears little similarity to the actual culture and mannerisms of the people in the South during this particular time in American history--other than the overt racism, of course. To make matters even worse, the local terrain looked nothing like that part of the American South either. Likewise, the translation from French to English also left something to be desired as well. Be that as it may, although this movie certainly had some potential, the obvious faults just mentioned were much too obvious to be ignored and, for that reason, I have rated it accordingly. Average.

Not one person sexually assaulted or any balls cut off!

It may be that the nightmarish quality of my memory of this movie is caused by my having seen it at about 2 a.m. one night in New York at one of those very seedy all-night theaters on Times Square while I was waiting for a 6 a.m. train. The American "South" portrayed in the film was as phantasmagorical (and real, in its way) as the vision of the country in Kafka's _Amerika_. As I recall it, the screenplay was quite faithful to Boris Vian's original novel of the same name, and both developed from European stereotypes of American culture, with some probable input from Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. The acting was barely tolerable, but the filming technique (again, as I remember it after almost 40 years) made it seem appropriate. Altogether this was a startling and powerful experience, obviously memorable, but I am sure that it was artistically very bad. Somehow that suggests that some examples of bad art can transcend their own badness, though the reasons are seldom clear.