Happily never after: the visual politics of contemporary French interracial romantic comedy

Abstract

ABSTRACT The term humour communautaire has been adopted to describe the widely popular genre of ethnic comedy cinema in France, films both praised for their ability to bring together diverse groups through humour while also raising scepticism as to whether a genre reliant upon stereotypes is not simply producing racist rhetoric. Such typecasting is particularly salient when non-European characters are juxtaposed against white counterparts, notably the case in films about interracial marriage. While stereotypes are certainly an important aspect of the representation of race in these films, this paper deviates from this typical reading to examine instead how the mise en scene in Romuald & Juliette (1989) and Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu ? (2014) undercuts narrative unity through spatial hierarchies and visual separation of racially marked bodies and white French characters. By interpreting the politics of representation in contemporary interracial comedies through the colonial and postcolonial theories of Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon, it argues that the films ultimately portray the impossibility of complete cohesion as found in colonial-era cinema.