Roschdy Zem (2016)
Rafael Padilla – the first black star of the French circus world, who performed under the name of Chocolat – was notably short-legged. Omar Sy is 6’ 3”: it’s his towering star stature in France, especially since Intouchables, that explains his casting as Padilla in Chocolat. Sy came to prominence initially as part of a comedy double act (with Fred Testot) and the formation of Padilla’s partnership with the white clown George Foottit is the starting point of Roschdy Zem’s biographical film. In the last years of the nineteenth century, Foottit (James Thierrée) and Padilla are both working in the decidedly mediocre Delvaux circus. Padilla plays, in a loincloth and various tribal paraphernalia, a supposedly funny-scary bogeyman-from-darkest-Africa. Foottit, a solo act, is warned by the circus owner Delvaux (Frédéric Pierrot) that traditional clowns are on the way out and his performing days numbered. In desperation, Foottit turns to Padilla and trains him in physical comedy. ‘Foottit and Chocolat’ are such a hit that they’re snapped up by a big-time operator, Joseph Oller (Olivier Gourmet), who runs the Nouveau Cirque in Paris. After years of scraping a living in provincial backwaters, the duo are a huge hit in the French capital.
Padilla’s ethnic novelty helps to make him a celebrity of the Parisian social scene but also reinforces the unstable nature of his succès fou. As well as wining, dining, womanising and gambling, he’s held in jail for a time because he can’t produce paperwork attesting French citizenship. Tensions between him and Foottit occasionally express themselves in their performances, even if their enthusiastic audiences can’t see these bits of extra business for what they really are. Although he finds the love of a good and beautiful woman in Marie (Clotilde Hesme), a young widow, Padilla’s fortunes plummet when he determines to branch out into legitimate theatre – a case of the clown literally wanting to play not Hamlet but Othello, which no black performer in France has done before. The first and only night of the production goes from bad to worse when, after getting booed in the theatre, Padilla is badly beaten up in the street by debt collectors. The action jumps forward to 1917. Back out in the sticks, Padilla is reduced to a job sweeping up for a circus even more downmarket than Delvaux’s. He is also dying of consumption. Foottit comes to visit Padilla on what soon turns out to be his deathbed.
Circus clown routines have always left me cold so most of the comedy of Chocolat was lost on me. It’s plain to see that George Foottit’s vain attempts to impress Delvaux at the start are physically inventive (James Thierrée, who is Charlie Chaplin’s grandson, is best known for theatre work which, according to Wikipedia, ‘blend[s] contemporary circus, mime, dance, and music’). Once Foottit and Chocolat got together, however, I was relying on movie clichés to give me my bearings. It’s obligatory in a showbiz success story on screen for the performer concerned to make an uncertain start before winning their audience over. Sure enough, Delvaux’s isn’t the only stony face as the new double act gets underway but there’s a transformative turning point and the other spectators on screen are reduced to helpless laughter – even though the act was as unfunny to me after as before. What’s more unfortunate in Chocolat is that, once things turn serious, the film gets increasingly ridiculous.
Roschdy Zem avoids the question of whether Rafael Padilla was any good as a Shakespearean tragedian. Zem does this because he evidently wants Chocolat to be a straightforward moral parable, reflecting racial attitudes in France at the turn of the twentieth century – any rejection Padilla suffers is the result of these. Zem can’t get away with that, however: the Othello episode is dramatically crucial to the story and the viewer has to be able to make sense of what’s going on. Padilla struggles in rehearsals but inexplicably comes good on the night. Flanked by his Desdemona and his Iago, he is all smiles as he takes a bow; it comes as a nasty surprise to all three of them – and to the play’s director Firmin Gémier (Olivier Rabourdin) – when the curtain call triggers catcalls. (It seems highly unlikely that a Paris audience of the era would hold back until this point to express its displeasure but that’s a relatively minor problem here.) Omar Sy seems to give Othello his best shot – presumably in order to express how much playing it means to Padilla. This seems pointless to the extent that we already know how much it means but it succeeds in doing what Roschdy Zem wants – to obscure the issue of the quality of Chocolat’s acting.
An interesting online article for Jeune Afrique by the novelist and journalist Nicolas Michel, which appeared in late January this year to coincide with the movie’s French release, summarises ‘what’s true, what’s false’ in Chocolat. The piece[1] poses and answers ten questions, including whether Rafael Padilla really failed as Othello. According to Michel, the film conflates two biographical facts. Padilla was the first black actor to play Othello in France but in a comic, mimed parody of a single scene from Verdi’s opera in 1894. His failure in straight theatre came seventeen years later in Moses, a play by Edmond Guiraud: ‘illiterate and incapable of learning lines’, Padilla was overwhelmed by the savage criticism of his performance. Michel has drawn his information from a 2012 book by the French historian Gérard Noiriel, which is also Roschdy Zem’s source material: Noiriel gets a screenplay credit, along with Zem, Cyril Gely and Olivier Gorce. The answer to seven of the ten questions is ‘false’ and to one of the remaining three – was Chocolat’s real name Rafael Padilla? – ‘uncertain’. One of the two ‘trues’ is that he was born into slavery, in Cuba.
Nicolas Michel doesn’t feel the ‘false’ answers invalidate Roschdy Zem’s ‘artistic choice’. That may be right in theory but Zem and his co-writers don’t supply the character detail we need to believe in Rafael Padilla on the film’s largely fictional terms. He’s a racial paradigm in a particular time and place yet we get little idea of Padilla’s feelings about the prejudices he encounters except when the story requires him to resent them very explicitly. A brief flashback to his Cuban childhood – in which the boy Rafael witnesses his father, serving at table, being made to beg like a dog for his white masters’ amusement – is truly shocking but it doesn’t connect with anything the adult Padilla says or does. The women he sleeps with, including his eventual wife, are white: we never know if this is a reflection of his sexual preferences – and, if so, what that signifies – or merely of what’s available in the belle époque circles in which Padilla moves. Omar Sy holds the screen throughout with ease but without showing a lot of variety.
The role of George Foottit (who was English) is even more underwritten. It’s amusing that, in civvies, Foottit suggests a middle-ranking bureaucrat rather than a clown (it’s especially amusing because James Thierrée, out of make-up, strongly resembles his famous grandfather). We seem meant to assume – on the grounds that he always looks miserable and at one point, while Padilla is in prison, visits a gay bar – that Foottit is oppressed by being homosexual. By the second half of the film, Roschdy Zem looks to have lost interest in George Foottit: he turns up when the plot requires him to but does little more than that. This is the function too, in a minor way, of Victor (Alex Descas), the Haitian subversive Padilla gets acquainted with in jail. The best acting in the film comes from Frédéric Pierrot in the early scenes. As Delvaux, Pierrot creates a brief but incisive portrait of a man so jaded by his years running the circus that he’s long past actually enjoying any of the acts that audition for him.
Closing legends on the screen confirm the title character’s importance in clowning history. Roschdy Zem then proceeds to demonstrate this with a surprising clip of the real Padilla and Foottit. The other ‘true’ in Nicolas Michel’s piece is in answer to the question of whether the pair were filmed by the Lumière brothers: it’s a brief excerpt from this footage that Zem shows. (It’s also embedded within the online Jeune Afrique article.) Perhaps the jerky movement of these ancient images helps but I found the clip surprisingly compelling. The routine looks rougher but physically more daring than any of the choreographed sequences in Zem’s film. I have to admit that Foottit and Chocolat, in the Lumières’ recording, are funny.
13 December 2016
[1] http://tinyurl.com/z8cdrwp
