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[womenofcine]

Le bonheur d'Elza (2012)

Dir. Mariette Monpierre

Country: France

Language: French

Rating: 2/5

There is so much beauty working for the debut film Le bonheur d’Elza by Mariette Monpierre—the first female director from the island of Guadalupe. The cinematography captures a sumptuous tapestry of the island’s natural beauty. Bright, saturated colors dance across the screen creating a stark, but welcomed, contrast to the film’s opening Parisian backdrop. The first time actors are capable, beautiful, and have palpable chemistry. However, the many successful bits and pieces ultimately makeup a disjointed whole, which often treads the line into soapy melodrama territory.

We open on Elza (Stana Roumillac) who has freshly graduated with honors from a Parisian university—a feat which thrills her mother. That almost immediately flips when Elza announces she’ll leave her life in Paris. She’s headed to her childhood home on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe in order to find the father who abandoned her. While she reconnects with her homeland through flashes of sun soaked joy we’re reminded of the french road films that preceded it. She also plays the part of a P.I., a rather awkward shift, and armed with a trust Pentax she discovers her father is a failing businessman who’s having an affair with a younger woman. She follows her father—Mr. Désiré (Vincent Bryd Le Sage), back to his sprawling mansion only to find his white wife, adult daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter, Caroline (Eva Constant). The wife mistakes Elza as a nanny for little Caroline, an error which Elza doesn’t correct as she’s too afraid to reveal that she’s actually one of Désiré’s many illegitimate children. From there she integrates herself seamlessly into their lives, using this access to more closely observe her father and the life he left her for.

There is much throughout the film that is lobbed at the audience and never actually receives a satisfactory conclusion or exploration. The men of privilege in the film are predatory beings who pursue women for sex outside of their marriages. Some of this is consensual, some is sex work, and some is flat out assault. One such character, Désiré’s son-in-law, assaults Elza twice, but in the scenes between they share quips and a heartfelt chat. Elza never confronts him, no one ever discusses it despite their overwrought reactions in the moment, and the film spends no time questioning or meditating on these actions. In fact, the second assualt leads to the film’s climax where Caroline almost gets hit by a car and Mr. Désiré has a heart attack. The effect has almost camp-like soap operatic effect that that merely hangs there as something we witnessed, and the characters seemingly forgot they experienced, as it bears no true weight on the progression of the film.

Additionally, the film is definitely trying to explore a very layered and important conversation on race in post-colonial territories. We’re thrown crumbs of the perceived difference between “good” and “bad” hair or light and dark skin, which are obviously still very loaded concepts. The film opens on Elza’s beautiful curls, which she’s trying to get tamed and straightened into a tight bun for her graduation party. For the remainder of the film she lets her curls go natural, which draws a cold comment from her father once she finally confronts him: “With your kinky hair, you couldn’t be my daughter.” Mr. Désiré has a white wife though from the mistresses we’ve seen—they’ve all been black. He even keeps his daughter, Caroline’s mother, from her lover as he is a black man and not deemed good enough in Mr. Désiré’s eyes. It’s a heavy subject and we’re left with a series of questions, observations, and heartache over post-colonial identity in Guadalupe—this self hate—but it’s so drowned by subplots and camp we’re never given a satisfactory grasp on what the director’s potential answers and conclusions are. 

Additionally, this racial divide is, for a moment, an issue separating Elza and her father as he cannot accept her due to her dark skin and kinky hair. However, after his heart attack she seeks him out at the hospital. Once he awakes they hold hands and it seems all has been forgiven. We fade into a scene of them dancing at his estate—him in a white suite, her in a black dress—in a rather obviously framed scene that feels out of left field. While heartwarming, the resolution was slipped in there to give the protagonist a happy ending and not because it was the natural evolution of character motivation. However, to even ruminate on post-colonial effects in Guadalupe, I’ll admit, was a refreshingly bold and unique theme to have included at all.

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