From ‘Black Orpheus’ to ‘Emilia Pérez’: when will western cinema learn to let Latin American filmmakers tell their own stories?
When the Academy Award nominations were announced last month, Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language musical Emilia Pérez scored 13, including ‘Best Picture,’ ‘Best Director,’ ‘Best Adapted Screenplay,’ and ‘Best Actress.’ For many in Latin America, the adoration heaped on the film is as unsurprising as it is disheartening. Set in Mexico but filmed in Paris and directed by a French filmmaker, Emilia Pérez is just the latest example of a European movie confidently telling a Latin American story without meaningful input from the people who actually live there.
European and American filmmakers have been mining Central and South America for inspiration since the earliest days of cinema, usually eschewing any effort at authenticity in favour of exoticising and fear-mongering. Movies like 1940’s Green Hell and 1954’s The Naked Jungle peddled stereotypes about the region in major Hollywood productions, but although they were problematic, they fell squarely into the pulpy adventure genre, a branch of cinema that rarely concerns itself with cultural authenticity.
In 1959, French director Marcel Camus changed the narrative and created a blueprint that directors are still following by releasing Black Orpheus, a film that had artistry and prestige written all over it but which was just as clichéd, problematic, and devoid of authenticity as the most hackneyed B-movie. Worshipped in Europe and reviled in South America, it allowed future filmmakers to fantasise and fabricate about Latin America from a Western perspective.
Black Orpheus is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice set in a favela in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival. To Camus’s credit, he drew inspiration from a stage play written by Brazilian writer Vinicius de Moraes, and from an outsider’s perspective, he did his absolute best to accurately portray the city and its inhabitants. He shot the film in Rio, used a largely local cast (though Marpessa Dawn, one of the stars, was American), and featured music from bossa nova pioneers Antônio Carlos Jobim, Luiz Bonfá, and João Gilberto.
Bursting with colour, music, and the singularly breathtaking beauty of Rio, the film became a smash when it was released, winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for ‘Best Foreign Film.’ It depicted Brazil in a way that Western audiences had never seen on quite such a scale, and it became a touchstone for many, including Morgan Freeman, who has said that it’s his favourite film.
But for Brazilians, it was controversial from the start, depicting a world that they barely recognised as their own. “The contrast between the fascination that Black Orpheus generated abroad and the contempt with which it was treated by Brazilians, who saw themselves depicted as exotics, invites thoughts on the loneliness of Brazil,” wrote musician Caetano Veloso in 2000, adding, “We Brazilians are frequently accused of being inauthentic because we don’t look enough like whatever foreigners saw in that film.” He pointed to the colours in the film – “so different from Rio’s real ones,” and the “the general ‘voodoo for tourists’ ambience” that pervades it as primary examples of the film’s shallowness.
The alienation Brazilians felt when watching the film and the stereotypes it reinforced for international audiences were bad enough, but the fact that Black Orpheus drew oxygen away from the country’s artistic renaissance was even worse. The Black Experimental Theatre movement was taking hold in Rio, while in the interior, a new city, Brasília, was being founded to revitalise that part of the country and celebrate Modernist architecture.
Brazilian music was also undergoing a sea change, with artists like Jobim and Gilberto tinkering with the classical sounds of samba to create bossa nova. Shortly after the film was released, the movement known as Cinema Novo emerged, inspired, ironically, by the French New Wave and Italian Neorealism. In short, Brazil was undergoing an explosion in culture, and there was absolutely no need for a French director to throw his artistry into something that he had no knowledge of.
More than six decades later, however, Emilia Pérez is a dispiriting reminder that for some filmmakers, Latin America is still an exotic place teeming with otherworldly stories that simply must be told, and not by the artists who live there. Even after the renaissance in Mexican cinema that yielded the likes of Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu, directors like Audiard find their own angles. In the case of Emilia Pérez, the backlash has been just as forceful as it was with Black Orpheus.
“There’s a drug war, nearly 500,000 deaths [since 2006] and 100,000 missing in the country,” Mexican screenwriter Héctor Guillén told the BBC, adding, “You are taking one of the most difficult topics in the country, but it’s not only any film, it’s an opera. It’s a musical.”
It wasn’t just the insensitive handling of the conflict that critics like Guillén found so galling. It was the fact that the production ignored any input or contributions from Mexican artists.
“Their way of making the film is to disregard so many in the [film] industry in Mexico already talking about this topic,” he said, citing the many screenwriters and actors who were not enlisted for the project. “Having a few Mexicans in there does not stop it from being a Eurocentric production,” he concluded.
The fact that the film has been showered with awards and nominations suggests that we are right back where we were with Black Orpheus when the international community embraced a film about a foreign country even though the actual inhabitants of that region denounced it as being, at best, completely inaccurate. At a time when English-speaking audiences seem more open than ever to movies with subtitles, there is no excuse for Western filmmakers to continue telling their versions of other country’s stories, no matter how much artistry goes into it.
