Vénus noire Reviews

(MU) Great story, real and well staged by long description of the shows and martyrdom of Sara the hotentote. She is delicate and expresses much with less, but there´s a problem of indolence...

Nowadays, Abdellatif Kechiche is one of the most heralded French(speaking) directors in the world. Indeed, his last movie, ‘La vie d’Adèle’, has won the Golden Palm at the Cannes film festival and two of his previous movies, ‘L’esquive’ and ‘La graine et le mulet’, have won the César of the best French movie of the year. Not too bad after directing only 5 movies. With this in mind, I was really eager to check this flick as well but honestly, it wasn’t really great. Basically, it is a very long drama dealing with a black woman who was constantly mentally and physically humiliated and the whole thing was just really sad, heartbreaking and sometimes even disgusting. The main issue is that it wasn’t really interesting, I’m afraid. Indeed, you never really get to know this woman, you never really get to know what she really thinks or feels, in spite of a solid performance by newcomer Yahima Torres, even though she didn’t have much to say. Instead, Kechiche spent much more time developing her various persecutors which was definitely not a rewarding approach. The ending, when you find out that this woman really existed, was not really a shock but made the whole thing even more depressing. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, I think it is still worth a look though, especially if you are interested in Abdellatif Kechiche’s work.