Le goût des jeunes filles is most certainly one of tastiest coming-to-self films to radiate the big screen in recent years. The market list for its successful recipe includes Dany
Laferrière’s poetry-laden story, Jean-Pierre St-Louis’s mirror-savvy camera, the
energetic music tracks from Ned Bouhalassa and Luck Mervil, and a pair of
engaging fifteen-going-on-thirty actors (Lansana Kourouma & Uly Darly)—all
under the insightful eye of master chef John L’Écuyer, who has the great sense
to let—not force—this thoughtful production seep into
consciousness.
Set in 1971 Haiti on the weekend that Papa Doc died and
Baby assumed his self-righteous position as President/Dictator for Life, Fanfan—a
white-shirt, grey-flannel student (Kourouma, whose considerable skills grow with
the role)—is spirited away from the
safety of his mother’s modest house by his fedora toting buddy Gégé (Darly—almost
too cute to be “bad”), who eagerly tutors his wide-eyed friend in the finer
points of adolescent life: booze, sex and machismo.
But Fanfan’s passion, in the alluring personage of Miki
(Koumba Ball), lives with her drink- and dance-loving colleagues just across the
street from his god-fearing mother’s house. It’s one of several love nests
established by a government minister, Papa (Maka Kotto) for himself and his
fellow henchmen when they feel the need to relax between their arduous schedule
of beatings, extortion and murder, which, much earlier, robbed Fanfan of his own
father.
Through merged point of view voice-overs (one beautifully
dissolved from black-and-white to colour), the ever-present radios, and a
photographer/reporter team from Rolling Stone, the desperation of the
people and their terrorizing Tonton-Macoute “protectors,” the political and
social landscape is revealed like the memory of a bad dream, yet much less
“on-the-nose” than Hotel Rwanda (cross-reference below).
L’Écuyer has subtly painted his canvas with apt allusions
to the “cowboy” mentality of North America; he uses long cigars and shiny guns,
jeeps for horses and set dressing of a movie poster for The Wild West.
On the spurs of those images, Fanfan’s immersion into the world of adult
pleasures goes horribly awry, even as the banjo (evoking a distant echo from
Deliverance) prattles on in the “saloon.”
From here, the film—in concert with the aging vehicles of
the day—sputters once in a while (the fancy-model photo shoot against shanty
town backdrop; Mireille Métellus, the stoic always crucifix-framed mother wondering if her only son will share the same fate as her husband), but finally
fires on all cylinders in the magical sequence where Fanfan’s fantasy blossoms into
reality. With discreet, exquisitely lit close-ups, the initiation of the student
of Magloire-Sainte-Aude’s verse into physical union with another, the boy
becomes man, reciting lines to ensure pleasure for both, realizing that Gégé’s Siegfried-themed mantra (“Nothing can happen if I have no fear.”cross-reference below), may allow him to cross more boundaries than those constructed by
cowardly oppressors.
This testament to what could be has a worldwide audience,
if only the sheriffs would get off their high horses and let their “people” see. JWR