"Indochine”
From “Indochine”
Although there were subtitles on the film, it was still confusing at times because I didn't always know what was going on.
I thought it was interesting how Eliane treats Camille and the people who work on her plantation, which she calls her coolies, so differently. I had never heard the word “coolies” before so I decided to look it up it said that it was defined as “the systematic shipping and hiring of Asian workers under contract on plantations that had been formerly worked by enslaved Africans” and is considered a derogatory slur. I was also surprised at the French reasoning for killing Asian families. Asian families were killed for having opium or starting riots and the French did it without any remorse. Jean Baptiste was the only one who seemed to see these families as people rather than objects.
The idea of arranged marriages is brought up in this film. Camille gets engaged to a man named Thanh who gets them into trouble because of his communist beliefs. Even though Camille is in love with Jean Baptiste, Thanh's wealthy mother arranges the marriage as a power strategy. Their marriage is purely political and strategic. Camille and Jean Baptiste end up running away and having a child together. The last thing Jean Baptiste ever does is baptize their son Etienne before they are captured and taken to jail. This goes to show how important it was to Jean Baptiste for Etienne to be baptized because he was willing to risk his life for it. With Camille in jail she is forced to become a communist in order to survive and lie to Etienne in order to protect him.
Word Count: 284
I really like how you dove deeply into the word coolies and what it meant because it demonstrated the amount of racism of minorities at that time. I understand you were not able to understand some of the movie but, Jean actually burned down a little boat with a young boy and father because he thought that they may be transporting opium across boarders. He was correct. I loved watching his character development through the movie because of this. it started out as him being so cold and hard and turned into him siding with the minorities and even fighting for them, specially Camille. I think the arranged marriage is interesting as well because she only wanted Jean. She escaped her arranged marriage to go and find Jean. She risked her life and left everything behind, which was wealth and stability for love.
ReplyDelete