THE RELEASE of a new film about one of France's best-loved novelists has been mired in controversy over the decision to cast the blonde, blue-eyed and pale-skinned Gérard Depardieu as Alexandre Dumas, the mixed-race author of The Three Musketeers.
Depardieu darkened his skin and wore curly hair to play the lead role in L'Autre Dumas( The Other Dumas), but critics have accused the film-makers of writing out the 19th-century author's ethnicity, and say a mixed-race actor should have been cast instead.
The maternal grandmother of Dumas, whose credits also include The Man in the Iron Mask, was a freed Haitian slave. The novelist, mocked by contemporaries for his African features, called himself un nègre, or a negro.
Anti-racism groups and prominent black Frenchmen said the decision to cast a white man in the role of Dumas missed an opportunity to remind French people of the national hero’s ethnic background.
Patrick Lozès, president of the Council of Black Associations, said he found it “shocking” and “insulting” that Dumas’s black heritage had apparently been suppressed for the big screen. “In 150 years’ time, could the role of Barack Obama be played in a film by a white actor with a fuzzy wig? Can Martin Luther King be played by a white?” he asked.
Jacques Martial, the black star of a French TV police drama, saw in the producers’ decision further evidence of “a mechanism of discrimination by silence”.
In their defence, the film-makers insist they chose France’s favourite actor for the role of Dumas because his larger-than-life personality was a perfect fit for the novelist.
Arguing that the controversy “makes no sense”, producers Frank Le Wita and Marc de Bayser said that “cinema, like life in general, does not reduce itself to genetics”.
“If diversity as a whole needs to be promoted, that need not be done to the detriment of artistic liberty,” they said in a statement.
“This, founded on analogy and metaphor, starts with the choice of actors.”
Safy Nebbou, the film’s director – of mixed race himself – noted that Dumas had been one-quarter black and that “it would have been an historic error to have chosen a métisse [mixed-race] actor”.
He conceded, however, that “France is enormously behind the Anglo-Saxons as regards actors from other ethnic backgrounds in the cinema and advertising”.
The new film focuses on the relationship between Dumas and his long-forgotten employee and collaborator Auguste Maquet, played by Belgian actor Benoît Poelvoorde.
French literary scholars differ on the extent of Maquet's involvement in writing classics such as The Three Musketeersand The Count of Monte Cristo, with some relegating him to the role of an assistant, and others crediting him with being a nègre of a different sort – the word also means ghostwriter in French.