Denis Ménochet plays Romain Gary in this film by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, adapted from the writer’s novel. A brutal return to 1960s America.
Romain Gary has written several screenplays and novels adapted for the cinema (“Les racines du ciel”, “La vie devant soi”…), sometimes becoming his own character in episodes from his life. Recently embodied by Pierre Niney in “La Promesse de l’aube”, the two-time Prix Goncourt winner is played this time by Denis Ménochet in “Chien blanc” (out May 22), a new adaptation of one of his books by Quebec director Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette. The novel was the inspiration for Samuel Fuller’s “Dressed to Kill” forty years ago.
This white dog is a lost pet that Romain Gary found one morning outside his Los Angeles home, where he was living at the time with his wife, actress Jean Seberg, a New Wave icon whose fragile look and hairstyle Kacey Rohl took on to play her. The dog looks so sweet, “Shall we keep him?” suggests Gary to his son Diego. But if he’s calm and obedient with whites, the pooch becomes a wild beast with blacks; he’s “a Southern dog”, trained to attack, “trained to kill” any black-skinned being. Believing the animal to be a victim of “human stupidity”, of “the savagery of man”, the writer decides to have this “racist” dog reeducated, rehabilitated, recivilized: “I need to believe in it”, he says.
Powerful archive images
If this film evokes the intimacy and disunity of the Gary-Seberg couple, who would soon divorce and commit suicide one after the other a decade later, it is above all a reminder, a brutal return to the America of the 60s, at the height of the civil rights struggle. At the time, Jean Seberg was more activist than actress, involved with the Black Panthers, the victim of a smear campaign, to whom she was also told “Leave us our struggle”.
How can we take part in a struggle that is not our own? asks the director, who intersperses her film with powerful archive footage of demonstrations, riots and their brutal repression by the white authorities, as well as the television announcement of Robert Kennedy’s assassination of Martin Luther King.
Although the staging abuses mirror images, these documents from the 60s are reflected in the final sequences of “White Dog”, which are entirely contemporary, shot in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Patrick TARDIT
“Chien blanc”, a film by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, starring Denis Ménochet and Kacey Rohl (out May 22).
