Claudine Raynaud,
"Foil, Fiction, and Phantasm: 'Josephine Baker' in Princess Tam Tam" (page 6 of 10)
A closer look at the roles of the white men in the films uncovers
another narrative. Although the young white man at the center of the
films should be the one who actively directs the action, in the three
films, the young heir of white civilization (the engineer in love with
the ward of the Marquis Severo, Jean Gabin as the sailor who ends up in
jail, and Max the failed writer) presents an image of white masculinity
strangely damaged by overpowering white females, or in Gabin's case, as
Ginette Vincendeau has analyzed, a certain ambivalence.[26]
In Sirens
of the Tropics, the marquis is a lecher. It is his wife who rules
over his colonial affairs and who eventually sails to the tropics with
her protégée to have her reunited with her fiancé.
In Princess Tam Tam, the wife is a devouring female, a "femme
émancipée," or flapper, and the film incorporates a
satire of this New Woman of the twenties. She smokes, she flirts, and
she drives an automobile.
Max de Mirecourt does not see his work as a novelist as art but
rather as a means of showing off in society and proving his talent.
Being a writer is a posture, a pose, a social position. This portrayal
of Max owes a great deal to vaudeville. When he sits down to write, he
flings loose sheets of paper about him, takes off his jacket, puts on
his gown and stares at the camera. He is accompanied by an agent,
appropriately called "Coton" (cotton), who at one point in the
film jokes about being a ghostwriter (un nègre in French).
The status of Tahar, the handyman and factotum in the writer's villa,
can also be equated to that of a slave. In a literal embodiment of
images of slavery, complete with erotic overtones, Max stops Tahar from
flogging Alwina, who has introduced herself illegally onto his property.
One often encounters Baker's function as a figure of transgression in
her films. She is a stowaway (Sirens of the Tropics), and a thief
and a beggar when begging is forbidden (Princess Tam Tam).[27] The
initial transgression in her native setting prepares the viewer for her
inability to bear the constraints of Western civilization in the scenes
of her Parisian life. Indeed, she dances in the sailors' bar to be free
and to be reunited with the people at large, the poor and the popular.
The maharajah earlier made the following ominous pronouncement to Max's
wife: "In the Orient, even the most humble has an independence that you
do not suspect."
Princess Tam Tam is the only film out of the three, unlike the
silent Sirens of the Tropics and Zou Zou, in which the
successful performance of the dancer and the singer is mis en
abyme as an illusion, or at least a fiction.[28]
Max's writer's block
leads him to invent a story of jealousy and revenge that aids him in
reclaiming his wife's admiration and love. His strategy is successful in
so far as he eventually writes a novel entitled Civilization, a
book that has fallen off the shelves in his "African" house, now owned
by Alwina, Tahar, and their child. He is ultimately portrayed signing
autographs for admirers. Max's pathetic literary attempts can thus be
read as modernism's essential gesture: the rejuvenation of decadent
Western culture at the spring of the authentic primitive. As numerous
critics have observed, this gesture of revivification found an
unexpected literalization in the figure of Baker.[29]
Baker was
African American: she did not put on a mask to create that "identity."
In other words, the stereotype of the primitive black body functioned in
the coincidence between the fulfillment of the modernist desire for
novelty and the "reality" of her civilian identity.[30] In the film,
Alwina never actually moves beyond Tunisia; she stays put, at home,
reclaiming the colony's usurped territory in the shape of the villa. The
phantasm of revivification appears for what it is: a phantasm, mere
narrative fiction. The film could thus be read as a comment on the way
in which phantasm, feeding on its representations of the alien other,
may leave that other untouched (the "and why not?" quoted earlier from
Baker's Mémoires). Having rekindled his flame for his wife
with a fake love affair with a native woman, the writer returns to the
vanity of his former life.[31]
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