Noirs et blancs en couleur (1976) - film review

January, 1915.  Far from the battlefields of Europe, a small group of French nationals live an uneventful life in a village on the Ivory Coast.  These include the alcoholic Sergeant Bosselet, the penny-pinching grocer Paul Rechampot, a reluctant pair of Christian missionaries and an aloof student of geography, Hubert Fresnoy.  When they learn about the war in Europe, the white villagers organise an improvised attack on a nearby German stronghold.  Although their enemy numbers a mere handful of German soldiers, the assault ends in farce. Fresnoy takes charge and sets about creating a small army of native Africans to fight for the glory of France...

Jean-Jacques Annaud’s first film is this subversive black comedy, a thoughtful and engaging satire on the absurdity of war and the injustice of colonisation.  It is one of the earliest French films to confront the subject of France’s murky colonial past head on and consider how the white colonising nations exploited the non-white people they came to dominate (particularly in Africa), through a combination of greed, thuggishness and deluded self-belief.

Whilst some clear moral messages can be drawn, it is a surprisingly ambiguous and contradictory film in which our sympathies with the various protagonists switch as the narrative unfolds.  The thoughtful student Fresnoy is at first a far more likeable character than his debauched, overtly racist fellow Frenchmen.  Yet, in very little time, he is gradually transformed into something quite disturbing, a kind of Nietzschen superman, the cool dictator who uses reason in place of instinct and race hatred to advance a rather pointless war.  Annaud’s thesis seems to be that it is not the ignorant xenophobes we should fear, but the brooding intellectuals and idealists.

Originality titled La Victoire en chantant (from the famous Napoleonic battle hymn Le Chant du départ), the film was a commercial failure when it was first released in France.  When it went on to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1976, it became a box office hit in the United States, titled Black and White in Color .   The film was then re-released in France, under the title Noirs et blancs en couleur – a rare example of a French film being renamed after its English language title.

© James Travers 2007

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