Fanon by Jean-Claude Barny

I was invited this Monday to the press screening of Jean-Claude Barny’s film on Frantz Fanon, a Franco-Algerian psychiatrist from Martinique. It was my first press screening so I had a lot of apprehensions. I imagined cameras and flocked mics for a crowded room. And no ! Barely half of the seats in the small room 2 of the Balzac cinema were occupied. While I expected to see many people of colour, of all ages, I was rather surrounded by a very little « diversified » ageing population – surely significant of the Fanon audience in France. I thought, as a Caribbean, that he was known worldwide ! That the fact that he is only famous in the West Indies and the United States was an exaggeration… Would this biopic be a way to introduce the author to the French public ?

In 1953, Frantz Fanon (Alexandre Bouyer) has just arrived in Algeria and is hired as a doctor in the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital. He discovers the inhuman treatment of patients, and tries to take back the reins of the institution. Immersed in a country in the midst of an independence and anti-colonialist conflict, Fanon has to face a much bigger crisis.

Although the resemblance between Alexandre Bouyer and Frantz Fanon is rather convincing, Barny’s Fanon remains at least a far too polite figure. We are presented with a perfect doctor who comes to Blida-Joinville as a deus ex machina to free patient/prisoners, create jobs, and give everyone a smile back – all sprinkled with moralising quotes. This Fanon is a bit like your friend too « woke » who always finds something problematic. A scene marked me : the patients are all together, racism « healed » by a game of football (like a good advertisement for Fifa), laughter, and tea. Seeing this, the doctor says : ‘It is behind their smile that their violence is hidden’. Unfortunately, these « solemn » speeches are found everywhere in the film. The viewer witnesses an emotional, pathetic sequence, and very quickly, this feeling is cut short by a serious sentence – « too much », cliché… The realistic effect of the biopic is spoiled, giving the impression that the director strives to place quotes here and there as soon as he can.

‘I didn’t want to make a film too talkative, but rather to show images, poignant things to the audience and create the feeling that they are participating in Fanon’s adventure from the inside’, explains the director, interviewed during the Marrakech Film Festival.

In practice, the director’s intention is quite difficult to grasp…. The film could have been called The Independence of Algeria (with a cameo by Frantz Fanon) that I would have understood the subject more. When the « biopic » was announced, I expected – especially from Jean-Claude Barny, Guadeloupean director – to see a strong anti-racist and anti-colonialist revolutionary momentum. While in fact, Frantz Fanon’s thought inspired the Black Panthers, I find myself as a spectator, facing a smooth and very commercial profile. The director explains that he has been planning to make this biopic for ten years but that he had trouble finding funds, surely explaining this script choice. I imagined a denouncer film as I could read Fanon be, especially in Black skin, White masks. I quickly find myself hungry when I only see the doctor, a victim of racism, remaining passive in the face of his aggressor, and only taking refuge in his home to dictate to his wife Josie (Déborah François) fragments of what will be his latest book The Wretched of the Earth. Josie Fanon, too, is the prey of this filter of passivity. Although we have scenes that show the embarrassment of a marriage between a « white French » woman and an anti-colonising « black » man, nothing is said. While Josie is also known for her committed spirit, in the film, she only takes pictures, writes the book dictated by her husband and gives birth to their son. It would therefore seem that, to have the necessary subsidies, the director had to « sell his soul to the devil » in the name of capitalism, and embellish the intense portraits of Frantz and Josie.

Thus, what we see is not the life of Fanon, but rather the (lost) lives during the war against the French colonial Empire in Algeria. All the same, it is an interesting and very important feature film that Jean-Claude Barny offers us, exceeding the expectations of a classic biopic.

In a French media world where you can be fired because you have denounced the massacres perpetrated by France in Algeria, Fanon reminds this amnesiac country of its colonial past, its own violence. Jean-Claude Barny uses this « aphatic » phenomenon, and exposes the racism, conspiracies, and ethnic eradication of the time, to counter the general apathy of the population on the current world situation. Both the one of neo-colonialism in the French Caribbean, and the genocides that are taking place all over the world right now.

Regarding the Israel commanded genocide in Palestine, Jean-Claude Barny says that ‘we cannot continue to accept that we occupy, that we discriminate, that we colonise, that we tear (people) from their land, that we dismisce, that we kill with contempt. We will have to make a choice and works like Frantz Fanon’s can put a little accuracy in this’.

Fanon releases in theatres on April 2nd, and although it is promoted as such, this « pseudo-biopic » is more about French colonial control in Algeria than Frantz Fanon himself. The objective of this feature film is not to make the author-psychiatrist known to the French public, but essentially to show them and remind them of the history of their colonising France. Although we can see Fanon as a vulgariser of the biopic, dotted with platitudes and clichés, it is a story very similar to a call for open-mindedness about the past, allowing (we hope) that it is also based on our dark present, too devoid of emotions.