Film Review: Monsieur Chocolat

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Foottit & Chocolat were a legendary clown duo in turn-of-the-century, belle époque Paris, famed for their trailblazing partnership: the first white/black clown duo and first popular clown pairing of white face and auguste. Chocolat, born Rafael Padilla to slaves in Haiti, was to become France's first black celebrity, long before Josephine Baker.

The story of the rise and fall of Chocolat's career and its relation to racial politics has intrigued many writers, and it has recently gained more attention with a French play and a new biography (both by Gérard Noiriel), an exhibition, and now the release in France of a major motion picture, Monsieur Chocolat, starring the celebrated French actor Omar Sy and the exceptional physical comedian and clown, James Thiérrée.

Omar Sy & James Thiérrée in Monsieur Chocolat

The film has yet to find an American distributor, though I'm guessing it will. Meanwhile, I was lucky to catch it my last day in Barcelona. My cut-to-the-chase verdict:

Clowning / Physical Comedy:  A
Acting:  A
Cinematography:  A
Writing / Historical Accuracy:  D

Here's the official trailer.



The good news is that the depiction of circus life and the fragments of some very physical clown acts are well done, thanks no doubt to Thiérrée not only playing Foottit, but also choreographing the action. Thiérrée (grandson of Charlie Chaplin) has the physicality to pull off the manic acrobatic clowning of Foottit, who was very much in the robust tradition of 19th-century British knockabout comedy. And Sy, like Chocolat not coming out of the clown School of Hard Knocks, still very much holds his own in and out of the ring. You can actually imagine the audience finding them funny!

Only a few short film clips survive of Foottit & Chocolat. Filmed away from the circus ring, these first two clips, shot in 1896 by French film pioneers the Lumière brothers, show fragments of a William Tell entrée and a chair routine.



This longer, colorized clip, likewise shot without an audience, provides more clues as to the range of their work and Foottit's agility.



In Fellini's film, I Clowns (1970), he had two contemporary clowns depict what Foottit & Chocolat's chair routine might have looked like. The results seem tamer and much jollier than the original work. (The old man in the audience is the clown James Guyon —Paris' first famous auguste— who escaped from his hospital death bed to catch one last performance at the Nouveau Cirque, but the excitement led to a heart attack that killed him —or so the story goes.)



Now back to the movie and that storyline, and why did I only give it a "D"?

First of all, some credit to the filmmakers for tackling an important subject. It's a tricky one, because the act very likely contained racist elements, and yet Chocolat often got to be on top and slap and throw Foottit around the ring. Chocolat played the auguste, aka "he who gets slapped," so being the fall guy wasn't by definition racist, though many spectators might have especially enjoyed that aspect of it precisely because he was black, while others may have savored his moments of revenge.

Chocolat Dancing in
the Irish-American Bar
Toulouse-Lautrec (1896)

We would have to have been there to truly understand the dynamics, but my sense is that the film oversimplifies matters considerably. In the movie, Foottit discovers Chocolat earning a  meager living in a poor provincial circus, playing an African "savage" whose job it is to frighten the locals. Foottit creates an act for the two of them, audiences love it, and a producer brings them to Paris. Their big break!! Their first taste of the splendors of the City of Light!! They become stars but flame out after what seems to be just a couple of years when Chocolat has had enough of being the lesser-paid, somewhat abused underling, slaps Foottit hard in the ring, and storms out, turning his back on him forever. Gambling and drinking send Chocolat on a downward spiral from which he never recovers.

Very dramatic and all, but...... not much of it is true. Chocolat was actually discovered by another
well-known clown, Tony Grice, around 1884, started performing in Paris in 1886, and soon gained a reputation as a very funny auguste, often working independently, as augustes did at the time. He was featured in several water pantomimes at the Nouveau Cirque, including starring in La Noce de Chocolat (The Wedding of Chocolat) in 1887 —with a white bride, no less.

When Foottit and Chocolat teamed up in 1890,  they were both already famous as comedians, in the ring and on the variety stage. And their partnership endured until 1909, which if you're counting is 19 years together —in clown years a lifetime. In the final stretch, they were both branching out, with solo appearances in  pantomime and music hall, notably at the Folies-Bergère. Nothing all that dramatic.

A biopic is bound to compress history and simplify matters in order to expound a theme, but the distortions in this narrative are large enough to drive a circus wagon through. A few other examples:
• Chocolat died of a heart attack, not tuberculosis, and Foottit did not miraculously materialize at his bedside, just in time for the duo to reconcile, Chocolat taking his last breath as we fade to black.
• They were not the first whiteface-auguste team, just the first wildly popular one.
• Foottit had two sons who eventually joined him in the ring; in the movie he is a loner, no family, and there is a strong implication that he is gay.
• Foottit was British and part of his comic persona was speaking French with a horrible accent; Thiérrée is Swiss and in the movie speaks normal French.
• In the film, Chocolat struggles with alcoholism. In life, they both did.

You get the point... Oh well, there's still a lot to like, so go see the movie, and kudos to Sy and Thiérrée. Worth the price of admission!

UPDATE: Moshe Cohen was so kind as to forward me this article in French which goes further in detailing the larger historical distortions that make the movie such a mess.

Click here for an excellent Circopedia entry on Foottit & Chocolat.
Click here for a post of mine on Footit & Chocolat from 4 years ago.
Click here for a post of mine from 5 1/2 years ago on James Thiérrée.
Click here for an article that explains why not everyone loves Fellini's I Clowns.
Click here for a good interview (in French) with Sy and Thiérrée.

James Thiérrée: On the Difficulty of Sitting Down

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After my post on eccentric dancer George Campo's incredible chair routine, which came by way of Betsy Baytos, I got a link by way of Ted Shapiro to a chair piece performed by James Thiérrée. Well, sort of a chair piece, because it's about his near-futile efforts to get his rag-doll body to somehow ooze into a proper seated position on a chair. Turns out all he really needed was for a strong woman to administer a swift kick to the seat of his pants.

For those of you unfamiliar with Thiérrée, he is a grandson of Charlie Chaplin and sister of Aurélia Thiérrée, and both of them have (separately) created and starred in numerous full-length pieces of visual theatre that are all rich in original physical comedy. See links below....



Links:
• Articles about Thiérrée reproduced on Pat Cashin's clownalley.net blog.
• My blog post: James Thiérrée in Raoul
• My blog post:  Aurélia's Oratorio at the Berkeley Rep

Physical Comedy in the 21st Century — James Thiérrée in "Raoul"

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As the lights went down at the end of the final performance of James Thiérrée's Raoul at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this afternoon, the entire audience immediately jumped to its feet to give him a rousing standing ovation.  And yet the New York Times review argued that "the charms of Raoul the show quickly wear thin."

What gives?

I'll tell you what we've got here.  On the one hand there's the performer's skill and magnetism, the world he creates, its impact on the audience. On the other hand there's the MEANING of the piece, so dear to critics, the overarching themes that connect everything and hopefully add up to a whole greater than its parts. Call it plot, structure, choreography,  playwrighting, whatever....



So let's start with the performer,  James Thiérrée, in what is essentially a one-man show.  Great-grandson of playwright Eugene O'Neill, grandson of Charlie Chaplin, son of Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée and Victoria Chaplin (Cirque Imaginaire), kid brother of Aurélia Thiérrée (see my post #67) — well obviously he has a lot to live up to. Lucky for him, luckier for us, he manages quite nicely, thank you very much. Thus the standing ovation, which Jim Moore, Jan Greenfield, and I had no hesitation in joining.

 

Thiérrée's movement is a stunning, fluid, and seamless blend of mime, circus, physical comedy, and dance. His routines are inspired and at times so complexly layered that you can only compare him to physical comedians such as George Carl or Bill Irwin at their best, or to a comic like Reggie Watts at his wildest.  There were many moments during the show when I felt as if I had been privileged to see Charlie Chaplin live.  Yes, there is a family resemblance (he's not adopted!), and Thiérrée's physical virtuosity reminds one of why W.C. Fields paid Chaplin the supreme compliment of saying "He's a goddamn ballet dancer. I'd like to strangle him with my bare hands."  If you're really interested in physical comedy, and not just reading this blog to impress me, do not miss a chance to see Thiérrée live.

But what is the show about and why was the Times so dismissive?  Well, you can read the review here, but the argument in a nutshell is that the world Thiérrée creates ultimately doesn't add up to much of anything and doesn't go anywhere. This is not necessarily an unfair argument, though certainly harsh.  There's no clear linear narrative, and the character is not anchored in naturalistic detail.  We gather that this is a tale of a man whose home is gradually destroyed, but we know not why. We see his fight to survive and make sense of his existence, but again it is not always clear what's going on. In those  moments when Thiérrée isn't wowing us, the piece tends to sag because we lack the conventional hooks of story and character.

What we get instead is more of a surrealistic dream world.  Raoul is in essence an abstract piece, open to multiple interpretations, pretty much like 90% of the dance pieces I see these days... though somehow they don't meet with the same scorn from the press.  Ditto opera, though I must admit I don't see much of that. The reality is that some shows are more performer-based and others more literary-based, and an ideal melding of the two usually proves pretty elusive. I think Bill Irwin pulled it off for most of Regard of Flight, but at least 95% of the time we have to accept an imperfect universe.  

Note to publicist:  Don't evoke Beckett in your press release. Too much to live up to; a strategy pretty much guaranteed to backfire with your more high-toned critics.

But here's another thing I like: our star's formidable talents, which the Times haughtily disparages as "Mr. Thiérrée’s shtick," are not merely technical. His interaction with the physical world has one foot in the inventions of Buster Keaton and the other firmly in a futuristic mindscape — thus my placing this show in my coveted category, Physical Comedy in the 21st Century — a designation reserved for performances that point the art form in new directions.  It is Thiérrée’s genius to transform all of the physical world, everything on stage, curtains and all. As surely as Dali painting a landscape, Thiérrée’s body and imagination interact with a dynamic theatrical set that itself becomes another character in the show.  What the hell am I talking about?? Hey, you gotta see the show, but take it from me that nothing on that stage is nailed down; nothing remains what it was. Dali, Bréton, Magritte, Miro and the gang would be proud.

Hey, I'd love to show you some representative video to back up my enthusiasms, but not doing too well there.  I continue to be unimpressed (shocked, actually) as to how so many strong shows have such poor promo videos. And why is it that funny shows have to have these artsy, lyrical trailers that don't even hint at comedy?  For example:



But like I said, try to see the show.  Meanwhile, here are a few good links for you, courtesy of Jim Moore.

• London Telegraph
• Sadler's Wells (London)
• The Age (Australia)
• The New Yorker