Gérard Depardieu playing Alexandre Dumas

[sanguinity]

Yanno, I wasn't ever expecting to be posting film news nor whitewashing news to this comm, but whaddaya know, this time it's an author of color being whitewashed.

Alexandre Dumas is being whitewashed:

The blond, blue-eyed Depardieu sports curly hair and darker skin to play the creator of The Three Musketeers in L’Autre Dumas.

Dumas, the world’s most-read French author and an exuberant, high-living celebrity, was the grandson of a former Haitian slave. His father, although a Napoleonic-era general, was referred to as a Caribbean “negro”.

In his lifetime the novelist was mocked for his African features and he called himself un nègre. [...]

Non-white celebrities, some Dumas experts and black organisations are angry because they say that the producers missed a chance to celebrate ethnic diversity in France and remind the world of the writer’s origins. “There is a mechanism of permanent discrimination by silence,” Jacques Martial, a black actor, said.

There is a mechanism of permanent discrimination by silence.

I find this casting choice especially unfortunate given that most people seem to already assume that Dumas was white. A couple hours of Depardieu in a curly wig (!) isn't going to dispel that association.

Comments

[sanguinity]

I found that to be a bizzare statement, given the context: hello, Dumas is an example of a mixed-race man who had blue eyes. I know nothing about the director, but if he's mixed race himself, bwuh...?

At this point, I'm wondering if the ellipsis in that quote has something to do with how the film industry tends to define racial identities in a very narrow, prescriptive way. I wonder if "black and white mixed race" is defined in the film industry to be a certain look, and that look always precludes blue eyes. (For reference to what I'm talking about, this quote by Lala Vasquez about how, because she's a black Latina, she can't get cast for roles as Latinas -- because in the film industry, Latinas are assumed to have a certain look, and that look excludes black.)