Tyler Stovall,
"The New Woman and the New Empire: Josephine Baker and Changing Views of Femininity in Interwar France"
(page 5 of 7)
Josephine Baker: Unlucky in Love
Josephine Baker's films have a lot in common, most notably the
repeated opportunities afforded Baker to demonstrate her singing and
dancing talents. Moreover, in spite of different plot twists, they all
end more or less the same way, with Baker realizing that she cannot have
the man of her dreams. In La Sirène des Tropiques, Baker
portrays Papitou, a young woman in the French Antilles who falls in love
with André, a visiting engineer from France. She follows him back
to Paris, along the way achieving fame and fortune as a star of the
music hall, but ultimately realizes that the object of her devotion
loves a Frenchwoman, and that she must graciously give way to their
love. Sirène provided the template for Baker's romantic
failures: Zou Zou and Princesse Tam-Tam both followed this
basic script, but added some interesting and complex wrinkles to it. In
Zou Zou the man Josephine Baker loves happens to be her adoptive
brother Jean, played by Jean Gabin, adding a certain incestuous theme to
the story. This love is doomed both because family ties make Baker and
Gabin's characters too close, and because race makes them too different:
Such a paradox perfectly reflected French ambivalence about empire. The
film ends with one of Baker's most famous scenes, mournfully singing of
loss while imprisoned in a cage.[video] Princesse Tam-Tam presents the
most complex romantic scenario of Baker's three feature films. It
constructs an extended dream sequence in which Baker follows a French
writer, Max de Mirecourt, to Paris. When Baker realizes she can't have
her man, the fantasy dissolves, and she reverts to being the anonymous
native woman observed at the beginning of the film.
Zou Zou: Haiti [Back to text]
One key reason for Baker's failure to win love is her identity as a
New Woman. Many aspects of her public persona, both on and off the
screen and stage, made her an example of the supposed revolt against
traditional female roles during the interwar years. Let us start with
her appearance. Quite apart from her costumes during her performances,
in her films Josephine Baker dressed in the modern style pioneered by
Coco Chanel, with skirts up to the knee and boyishly slimming dresses.
Her hairstyle in particular revealed this: Cut short and straightened in
the best garçonne style, it won many admirers and enabled
Baker to launch her own line of hair pomade, Bakerfix.[27]
Baker's image
as a New Woman went beyond fashion. Her films portrayed her as a dynamic
individual, someone who did not shy away from aggressively pursuing what
and whom she wanted. Whether it be stowing away on a ship to follow the
man she loved to Paris, as in La Sirène des Tropiques, or
dashing onto the dance floor in defiance of all convention, as in
Princesse Tam-Tam, Josephine Baker's characters were
strong-willed women who demanded recognition and asserted their rights
to happiness.
And yet in Baker's films this very assertiveness generally
boomeranged. Time and time again, Baker's characters lost the
competition for love to passive women who sat at home and waited for
their lovers to pursue them. In La Sirène des Tropiques
Papitou saves her hero's life by climbing a tree and shooting his
opponent in a duel. This brave act avails her naught, however; in the
next scene she surrenders her love for him [video] to the Frenchwoman who
demurely acknowledges her sacrifice while standing in her bourgeois
parlor. In Zou Zou the eponymous heroine secures Jean's release
from prison, only to see him fall into the arms of the woman who did
nothing to save him. Baker's flamboyant and triumphant performance in
Princesse Tam-Tam forces her rival to flee, but this act of
flight ultimately wins her husband back.[28]
In all three films, Baker as
the New Woman loses out to the woman who represents tradition and
modesty, the woman who allows the man to be pursuer instead of pursued.
Fittingly, these scenes of lost love are followed by performances by
Baker, underscoring the contrast between the music-hall star and the
wife.
La Sirène des Tropiques: Final Scene [Back to text]
Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
Next page
|