You might have heard about Saartjie Baartman, also called the Hottentote Venus. This woman was born around 1789 and died in 1815 - at only 26. She came from South Africa to London and then to France to become famous as a dancer and as an artist, but all she got was being shown in a cage in front of White people and mistreated by her employer, an Afrikaaner - a Dutch from South Africa - who had come to Europe to become rich.
Because of her extra-ordinary body - large hips and buttock and bulging genitals - she became a freak: treated like a inferior human being, she had to pretend to be a monkey and to let people touch her on stage, when she was actually perfectly normal.
Soon enough, she started drinking and ended up her life as a prostitute - she probably died of alcoholism and STDs. But before that, in 1815, the Museum of Natural History in Paris payed to measure her and to examine her because "she was part of bizarre race". What scientists concluded was that she had similarities with orang utans and mandrills.
After her death, George Cuvier, a zoologist and surgeon, bought her body in the name of science and dissected her, placing her brain and her genitals in bowls full of formol that were shown to scientists to validate the thesis that indigenous people would always be inferior to Whites.
Her body was then moulded, exposed in the Museum until 1974, and kept until 2002. Then, South Africa got it back and offered this Black Venus a descent burial.
Abdellatif Kechiche decided to make a film about her. About her misery, her conscience, her despair. About how people can be cruel, sordid, brainless. About history, horror, racism. About women. Even though some might say that there are a lot of redundancies - the scenes where she performs on stage, where she pretends to be an animal, where people touched her and fear her -, even if Kechiche makes the choice to deliver an objective, hard, disturbing drama, it is a powerful and magnificent film. Unbearable at time, but profoundly true and important, dark but sensitive. A biopic that will remain in the minds, and a great tribute to the woman who was once dragged in the mud and who is here erected to the rank of an icon.
MJ
