Promoting Intellectual Film Culture Since 1973
|
|
Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman)
Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman) (1971) Brazil Directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos Written by Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Humberto Mauro Cinematography Dib Lutfi Film Editor Carlos Alberto Camuyrano Original Music Guilherme Magalhaes Vaz and José Rodrix Produced by Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Luis Carlos Barreto With Arduino Colasanti, Ana Maria Magalhães, and Eduardo Imbassahy Filho Details 80 minutes, Color, in Tupi, French and Portuguese DVD: USA, 2007 Distributed by New Yorker Video (region 1) Aspect Ratio 1:37 full frame Recommended Retail Price $29.95 Extras Discussions with Richard Peña (Professor of Film Studies, Columbia University) and Aílton (member of Krenak tribe), Essay excerpted from Darlene J. Sadlier’s Contemporary Film Directors: Nelson Pereira dos Santos (University of Illinois, 2003), Optional English Subtitles.
In this country no Governor no Bishop, or other authority could please God, Our Lord, for the evil is much impregnated in the customs. - the missionary Padre Nobrêga, from a title card in How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman
Over the years, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (Como era gostoso o meu francês, 1971) has been dismissed as pornography at Cannes, hailed as a masterpiece by director Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ Cinema Novo contemporaries, and since viewed as a keenly ironic commentary on Brazil’s struggles with economic development, history, ethnicity and race.
While a more contemporary viewing of How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman might be inclined to consider it alongside a more recent wave of Western films addressing the perspectives of Amerindian/native populations, much of dos Santos’ most-discussed film is referential within the context of its culture and time. It does certainly belong to a transnational movement of film expositions of native cultures, but How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman is as Brazilian as bossa nova, and while that forces it to engage with its past and Brazil’s present in a serious way, it is also clearly a product of its own time.
The film’s opening is a satiric visual exposition of French Protestant colonist Villegagnon’s letter to his colleague and friend, John Calvin, from a settlement in Brazil’s Guanabara Bay in the area of modern Rio de Janeiro. As Villegagnon describes the austere morality measures put in place at his encampment, we see images of nude Amerindian women exchanging seductive glances with the shaggy-haired French colonists. While Villegagnon notes that ‘twenty-six of our mercenaries, lured by their carnal appetites, conspired to put me to death,’ the on-screen images are of several defecting colonists who appear to be harmlessly cohabiting with the native women in a kind of rural commune in the woods. ‘The next day we released one of them from his chains, so that he might plead his case in greater liberty; but breaking into a run, he threw himself into the sea, and drowned.’ Here, one of the defectors is tied down with weights and thrown into the sea, the culmination of a discrepancy between words and actions, a dialogue among estranged encounters that is redolent with the history of Brazil’s colonisation and the more contemporary conditions of living under a dictatorship during 1970-71, the time of How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman’s filming.
The man thrown into the sea is the Frenchman of the title, and, we discover after the opening credits, that he has survived by swimming back to the shore, where he staggers along the coastline until he is captured, first by Portuguese and then by a party of Tupinambas, allies of the French, who believe him to be Portuguese by association. An oral test of languages follows (the Frenchman repeats a piece of Montaigne-influenced nonsense poetry, while the various Portuguese prisoners recount the necessary preparations for cooking lamprey), but the Tupinambas’ leader has made up his mind. The Frenchman will be his meal, after living for eight months in his village and performing spousal duties for a woman whose husband was killed by the Portuguese.
The latter premise is lifted from the journals of Hans Staden, a 16th-century German trader who operated in Brazil as part of a Dutch contingent prior to his capture by natives. Staden was constantly threatened with death and encountered cannibalism on several occasions; he wrote compellingly of his experiences in a narrative that has had some popularity among Brazilians and outside scholars.
Unlike Staden, the Frenchman of dos Santos’ film will not ultimately escape from his captors and therein lies one of the more modern twists to a film whose plot is largely construed as it could have been centuries earlier. The act of cannibalism holds a symbolic significance in Brazilian intellectual culture, dating to the Brazilian modernist creative movement of the 1920s and Oswaldo de Andrade’s 1928 essay, the ‘Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto).’ De Andrade’s ‘Manifesto’ recasts cannibalism as an ideal wherein modern Brazilians assume the traditions of their largely exterminated Amerindian forebears and seek to ‘consume’ their enemies and fellows not solely as an act of violence but with the goal of absorbing the other’s personal and communal power, which in the seventeenth century could be that of a warrior and in the twentieth could be cultural production or intellectual distinction, and in both centuries is a tacit preconceived dominant status. ‘We had the right codification of vengeance,’ de Andrade writes, alluding to Amerindian culture. ‘The codified science of Magic. Cannibalism. For the permanent transformation of taboo into totem.’ Richard Peña, in his video commentary on the How Tasty DVD, qualifies this interpretation of cannibalism as ‘killing someone in a way that honors them. You’re not only destroying them, but you’re destroying them in such a way that you’re incorporating them into yourself. [And] all the things that made them a worthy opponent.’ In the 1960s and 1970s, the revitalization of ‘cannibalist’ cultural philosophies in Brazil was linked to the reactive avant-garde movement known as Tropicalism, of which film was a valued medium.
The Frenchman is not only to be physically cannibalized, but he also engages in a form of cultural cannibalism among his captors along the lines of de Andrade’s prescription for the ingesting—and later defecation—of European culture. Upon learning that he is not to die immediately, the Frenchman appears to adapt to Tupinamba life with relative ease, shaving his facial and body hair, removing his clothing, and absorbing the language and cultural rules of his temporary surroundings.
In a carefully conceived deviation from Staden’s journals dos Santos stages the intervention of another interloper, a French trader who has had prior business relations with the Tupinamba chief and is determined to continue them, even if it is at the cost of a countryman’s life. While the French trader denies the Frenchman’s nationality, condemning him to be cannibalized, he exploits the latter to use his own cultural immersion to benefit both of them economically. Motivated by the dual temptations of economic benefit and the promise of eventual escape, the Frenchman wills his native wife Seboipepe to aid him in collecting pepper and Brazilwood in the jungle to be sold to the trader. In a later scene, the French trader overplays his hand, discounting the Frenchman’s immersion among the natives and his transgression proves fatal.
We later see that the Frenchman’s emotional induction into the tribe is complete when he jumps with joy after his Tupi companion murders a Portuguese at long range with an arrow. But, as Oswaldo de Andrade and his ‘Cannibal’ compatriots had recognized in the 1920s, immersion of the consciousness is only a metaphoric substitute for the physical. The Frenchman still plans his escape, and his captors still plan to devour him.
The film progresses to its inevitable conclusion among some final acts of desperation. Following an escape attempt that is violently defused by Seboipepe, the Frenchman is prepared for the slaughter, but at the last minute refuses to repeat his prescribed final phrase in Tupi. He shouts the scripted words in French, ‘After I am dead, my friends will come to revenge me,’ and then ad-libs an addendum, exposing his more transitory identity among the Tupinambas, ‘There will be no more of you on this earth!’ The Frenchman is killed, but the final image on the screen, more metaphoric than real, implies the Tupis’ impending semi-extermination at the hands of the Portuguese.
Despite its English subtitles of dubious reliability (a three-sentence paragraph in spoken Portuguese is occasionally rendered into one abbreviated English phrase), New Yorker Video’s re-release of Nelson Pereira dos Santos How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman should be heralded as an admirable re-release of an enduring work that is unfortunately one of only a few important Cinema Novo films available abroad. Richard Peña’s 10-minute videotaped commentary included as an extra is a relevant commentary on the film within its time and place, but a monologue by Aílton, a member of a Brazilian Amerindian tribe, is not particularly in depth. Aílton calls How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman ‘a poetic memory of this encounter,’ referring to the moment of colonization, and cites the film as ‘one of the most positive representations of our history,’ clarified to be ‘the native Brazilian’s history.’ Aílton later appears to sum up one importance of the film’s subtext and inclinations, although he is actually speaking of the essential survival of Amerindians when he proclaims, ‘There is no chance of exterminating us. Our enemies have lost the war,’ a statement meaning, presumably, that both sides have imbibed and absorbed.
One of dos Santos’ contemporaries, fellow director Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, writes of cannibalism in regards to his own film Macunaíma (1969), in a statement that also serves as an appropriate contextualizing epilogue to How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman.
‘Today we can clearly note that nothing has changed,’ he writes. ‘Every consumer is reducible, in the last analysis, to cannibalism. The present work relationships, as well as the relationships between people—social, political, and economic—are still basically cannibalistic.’
De Andrade’s final words reflect Aílton’s. ‘Victims and executioners are one and the same; devouring themselves. Everything, whether it be in the heart or in the jaw, is food to be consumed. Meanwhile, voraciously, nations devour their people.’
References
de Andrade, Oswaldo (1928), “Cannibal Manifesto” (trans. Mary Ann Caws and Claudia Caliman), Exquisite Corpse, accessed 25 January 2009.
Staden, Hans (1527; 1929), The True History of His Captivity (ed. and trans. Malcolm Letts), New York: Robert McBride.
Contributor details
|
Previous IssuesLatest Issues
|
