Written and Directed by Ousmane Sembène
Starring Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Anne-Marie Jelinek and Robert Fontaine
France, Senegal, 1966
So far the movies I’ve been watching for Black History Month have been very male-centric, so let’s take a break and focus on a female lead in BLACK GIRL, starring Mbissine Thérèse Diop as a woman from Senegal who takes a job as a nanny for a wealthy French family only to be disillusioned when she takes the chance to travel with them to France. She enters into the agreement thinking she’ll simply be watching the kids by day, then going out and exploring Paris by night, but is disappointed to find out once out of Senegal she is treated more like a live-in slave, never leaving the apartment, and forced to do all the cooking and cleaning, which she never had to do before.
This is contrasted with flashbacks to her life in Senegal where she spent most of her time outdoors, and was in the process of engaging in a budding relationship before taking what she thought of as an opportunity of a lifetime to head to France and escape her humble beginnings.
The movie takes an unexpectedly tragic turn in the end, which, in retrospect, may have been inevitable, but as it unfolded, was a heartbreaking shock for me.
Although the problems in this movie are rooted in colonialism and racism, they manifest themselves in a seemingly impassable gulf of miscommunication. Perhaps it is naïve to think if only “master” and “servant” were able to understand each other, such a tragic end could have been avoided. I guess the real problem is that “masters” simply cannot see reality through their lens of privilege and will never know what their “servants” are thinking and feeling, as long as they refuse to try to live in a world outside their own experiences.
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