What I remember best about The Triplets of Belleville, Sylvain Chomet’s eccentric, inscrutable animated comedy is its opening: a flashback showing the titular triplets performing on stage in the 1930s. There’s Charles Trenet and Django Reinhardt jamming in the orchestra pit, Fred Astaire inexplicably being devoured by his own shoes and, for reasons best known to Chomet, what appears to be a giant dancing baby. Best of all there is Josephine Baker, strutting through her famous banana dance and driving men wild:
This was ‘La Baker’, the woman who caused a sensation in Roaring Twenties Paris and became a symbol of the Jazz Age, more celebrated in her adopted France than her American homeland.
She was born Freda Josephine McDonald on 3 June 1906 in St. Louis, Missouri and survived a childhood of poverty and parental neglect. She married at age 13 and again at 15, this time to Billy Baker, who fell in love with her after seeing her dance in the chorus at Philadelphia’s Standard Theatre. Five months later she joined the second touring cast of Shuffle Along, the seminal all-black musical that also launched the careers of Florence Mills and Adelaide Hall. In 1925 Caroline Dudley, a talent scout for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, spotted Baker dancing at the Plantation Club in Harlem and invited her to Paris to perform in what would become La Revue Nègre.
Paris was primed for her arrival. The Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, which eventually lent its name to the style ‘Art Deco’, had opened in April and included a section dedicated to African sculpture. Jazz was everywhere and nightclubs and theatres put a premium on black performers. Baker made her debut on 2 October and was immediately embraced as the ‘Black Venus’, the most dazzling, sensuous entertainer in Paris and the poster child for the Charleston.
She would remain one of France’s most beloved stars for nearly half a century, working with the French Resistance during the Second World War and campaigning for civil rights. In 1963 she was the only official female speaker at the March on Washington; she appeared wearing her Free French uniform.
Primarily a stage star, Baker made very few films. Siren of the Tropics, Zouzou and Princess Tam Tam are among her best known.
In Siren of the Tropics Baker receives top billing as Papitou, a young Antillean woman in love with a white Frenchman, and struggles to flesh out a stereotype in a melodrama groaning with them. It helps that she is a natural comedienne. Papitou’s love returns to Paris and she tries to buy a ticket to follow him, but there’s a queue. Undeterred Baker forces her way to the head of the line, shoving the other customers back with her hips and rear end as if dancing a reverse conga. Papitou can’t afford a ticket so she decides to stow away, swimming out to the ship as it leaves port. A crewman lowers a bucket for her to climb into, then hoists her up the ship’s side and in through a window. Baker flops onto him, limbs flailing, like an ungainly mermaid.
Yet she never quite escapes the film’s racism. Soon after Papitou is rescued she falls onto a coal pile, then stumbles into a white matron who shouts that there’s a black devil on the loose. Next Papitou hides in a flour bin and emerges plastered in the stuff, only to bump into the same woman, who now frantically declares that she’s seen a ghost. According to Judith Mackrell’s excellent book Flappers, about Baker and five other iconic Jazz Age women, Baker later claimed that the film’s script hadn’t been translated properly for her and she’d had no idea how many crude jokes it contained.
Zouzou was a great leap forward. As children, ‘twins’ Zouzou and Jean are star attractions in a travelling circus: she’s black; he’s white. They grow up into Baker and Jean Gabin respectively. The plot is a contrivance for her to end up on stage. Baker does impressions, impersonating a singer and a big top’s worth of circus folk, and sports a hat with an enormous bobble fit for a clown. She and Gabin share such convincing chemistry as siblings, you can hear the plot gears grinding when it’s revealed that Zouzou is secretly in love with Jean. Quel dommage.
The film veers from comedy to melodrama to musical, though the resulting choppiness might not entirely be director Marc Allégret’s fault. The print I saw included a word-salad-like translation that reminded me how much we take pronouns for granted.
Still, Gabin and Baker are charismatic enough to hold everything together. Halfway through, a star struck Zouzou fools around on stage. Baker performs with her entire body, strutting like a chicken, kicking her heels into the air and whisking her hands back and forth in front of wiggling legs in the Charleston ‘fan’. Allégret simply pauses to admire Baker’s body and joyful virtuosity. It’s the best scene in the film.
Zouzou was such a hit that Baker made Princess Tam Tam the following year. She plays Alwina, a Tunisian street urchin whom French author Max (Albert Prejean) meets on holiday. About 20 minutes in the film show’s its hand: Pygmalion, with race thrown in alongside class and gender. For modern audiences it’s a rough ride. Max is suffering from writer’s block and intends to civilize and seduce Alwina as fodder for his next novel. When he learns his wife has been having an affair with a maharajah (played by a Caucasian actor in brown face) in his absence, he ups the ante by having Alwina masquerade as the African Princess Tam Tam, duping Paris and infuriating his wife in the process.
Baker is playful as Alwina and a font of simple-minded wisdom. On the ship back to France, Max proudly shows her her cabin and she stares in confusion at the glass canaries in the bird cage, the glass fish in the aquarium. “There are so many fake things here,” she says. “Some fake things are prettier than real ones,” Max tells her. “I didn’t know,” she replies humbly. Yet the film isn’t really a satire of Parisian pretension. For every joke at the expense of the smart set there’s another about Alwina’s vulgarity: she eats with her hands, stuffing her face. Baker dances as exuberantly as ever, flinging off her shoes for her big number, but never quite transcends the film’s racism and sexism.
Josephine Baker was a cultural phenomenon and Siren of the Tropics, Zouzou and Princess Tam Tam all go some way to showing what made her unique. Yet something is missing: the self-assured spirit of mockery with which she played with stereotypes on stage. As Mackrell points out, you can glimpse it in a 1927 clip of her performing at the Folies Bergère. I wish someone had had the wit to capture more of that spirit on screen.
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