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ARTS AND CULTURE

Black clown's 'house slave' awakening

  • 05 July 2017

Monsieur Chocolat (M) Director: Roschdy Zem. Starring: Omar Sy, James Thierrée. 119 minutes

With 1.9 million tickets sold in France, Monsieur Chocolat is a bold period drama which takes a brutal snapshot of racial issues in the country around the turn of the 20th century.

Rafael Padilla (played here by Sy), who was most famously known as Chocolat the clown, was the first black performer to rise to fame in France. As this film shows, it was a difficult role to play at a time when non-Anglo French were either hidden away or publicly shamed.

Public shaming accompanies his rise to fame and fortune as part of a 'clown blanc and Auguste' duo — a popular theatrical device wherein the Auguste (usually black-faced) clown plays dummy to a white clown of higher intelligence who inflicts hilarious acts upon Auguste.

Experimental circus artist George Foottit (played by Charlie Chaplin's grandson, Thierrée) comes up with the routines, playing the clown blanc role expertly. It isn't long before the duo has a strong following, and the act takes Padilla from working at a lacklustre circus in the countryside — acting the absurd cannibal 'Nigger King Kalanka' to scare white people and their children — to the grandiose Nouveau Cirque in Paris. Virtually overnight, Padilla finds himself with more money and fame than he ever imagined.

And yet the differences between his King Kalanka and clown Auguste roles are far fewer than Padilla initially imagines. What he gains in applause, money, celebrity and romantic conquests, he loses in self-respect — a realisation that comes into sharp focus when, thanks to a cruel former employer, he is thrown in jail. (While Padilla managed to escape slavery — his father was a house slave in Cuba — he remained 'undocumented' and constantly terrified of being locked up.)

Padilla spends a week in prison where, amid the torture and racial abuse, he listens to the thoughts of a black revolutionary who was continually being locked up for his unrepentant stance on race issues. Padilla's continued exploitation comes coldly into view — while he is being paid better for it, he is still being used to attract crowds who like to see a black man kicked around the stage by a white man.

Malcolm X famously delineated two types of slave — the 'house Negro' and the 'field Negro' (now commonly referred to as 'house slave and field slave'). Although a 'house slave' is closer to their oppressor and

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