This film was presented at this year's NewFest as "an intriguing investigation of racial, class, gender, and sexual power dynamics." What it really is is a deeply dangerous, exploitative masterclass on how NOT to foster representation in cinema.
The film's premise is sophomoric and laughably unrealistic even by B-Movie standards: A young sophisticated Black woman, Simone, is lawyer volunteer to battered women by day, and sex cam BDSM performer (and budding orgy enthusiast) by night. If you can get past that (insulting) narrative implausibility that any woman would put such hardwon success at such needless risk, the film itself is a bland event. It's an artless film, stylistically stale, and narratively weak. The camera remains fixed throughout, for a TV aesthetic. The acting is rigid and unconvincing. Presented more as random vignettes than as a genuine developed narrative, it desperately hopes to be transgressive but collapses under the burden of its pretenses and is ultimately guilty of participating in the very power structures it wants to condemn.
I'm a Black Brazilian woman (now expat), just a bit older than the film's protagonist. I'm supposedly who the film purports to depict. But this film has nothing to do with those who it speaks on behalf of. Of course, with any political or social discourse, it's always intention that matters most. And it's the film's intention that is poisoned. One reviewer described the film as "more sinister than disturbing" and that is apt.
The film's director described, without the slightest irony, that her impetus for the film was to make a film about sexuality and that she initially sought to confront her bias about pornography, as her partner in real life was enthusiastic about it and she was not. She initially wrote a script that did not include the discourses on race and class and that did not even include a lead character of color. Later, as the BLM and MeToo movements became fashionable, her writing partner suggested the protagonist "needed to be Black." In essence, four white writers came together to stitch on social discourse to their film *after the fact*, making Black pain a narrative prop or accessory to their story. That is the polite way to say it. The more accurate way is to say that four white writers (two of them men), were colonizing Black women's trauma for their own artistic gain for what, in the end, amounts to a thinly disguised, vainly self-indulgent sexual snuff film.
The political insights are stiff and didactic and forced in through actual academic lectures and utterly unnatural exchanges by the film's actors. In one scene, the protagonist says to a BDSM-engaged friend: "You can hold an exhibition of me tied up to reiterate all the historical images that are attached to my body." It's necessary to remember these are words being forced into a Black woman's mouth by four white filmmakers. The very existence of this film is the epitome of White entitlement, that any White filmmakers would think it their province to speak on the part of those they've oppressed and in this flippant manner. Just as the much-discussed "mansplaining" in culture these years, there is such a thing as "White-splaining." There is such a thing as parasitic, exploitative empathy. And RULE 34 is a totem to it.
Black people around the world do not need what has been done to them by White people explained to them by White people. The point of all the recent social revelations of these past years is that it is time for our (diverse) voices to be returned to us, to be invited to tell our authentic stories. Not for White voices to speak on our behalf, and in this case, to speak over our voices. Films like this are regressive and deeply dangerous. And more than outrage, I just feel deep pain that White filmmakers fantasizing Black trauma could ever be confused as something progressive. It takes a lot of people to make a film like this. Not one of them thought it might it might be deeply offensive to make a toy of hypotheticals like: "What if a woman driven to defend abused women was actually kinda into it, and secretly aroused by sexual violence in private?" Or to depict a Black Woman as complicit and even enthusiastic in her own self-destruction. Not one of them? And what of all the film festivals or film partners who might enable such false equivalences that the film plays with? Do you really need to have it explained to you that Black oppression and BDSM are not acceptable metaphoric dualities? Not one of you saw how insanely distasteful, socially tone deaf and predatory films like this are? How they counterfeit social outrage for the sole benefit of their makers? Has so little really changed in these recent years, after a worldwide discourse?
Who does it benefit to watch a Black Woman in distress for two hours? This is the question. Those who the film pretends to defend or speak on behalf of? Black women, Black people, women in dangerous situations, people at the mercy of oppressive cultures? How much of the money the film might reap have the film's director, Julia Murat, and its producers committed to the causes the film depicts? If the answer is none, that is the very definition of exploitation. The film is then only vehicle to further the ambitions of White folks at the expense of Black folks.
Please don't let us be insulted this way or used this way. Please have the decency to be outraged. And I would say to those who genuinely seek to be our allies: can you quiet your voices long enough to hear our voices? To let us tell our stories? To let us tell our TRUTH? Your privilege can be accomplice to our real liberation...but not like this, not like this film.
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