Audience Member
Awesome, totally awesome. This could be my favorite film of all time. Watch it with La Commune, or every time after watching a John Ford western.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/24/23
Full Review
walter m
Of all the screen versions of Custer's Cosmic Comeuppance, "Don't Touch the White Woman!" is easily the most surreal in its giddy satire of the old west transposed to the streets of modern day Paris. Marco Ferreri directs in a blithely anarchic spirit(the Indians realize their full power in collective action) but still deadly serious when it comes to the crimes of the era. The Indians under the leadership of Sitting Bull(Alain Cuny) are trapped in a building site. The railroad interests conspire with Pinkerton(Paolo Villaggio), claiming to be an anthropology professor, looking on in casual modern dress.(I don't have to explain the significance of that name, do I?) They bribe General Terry(Philippe Noiret) with railroad bonds which he gives to his daughter(Daniele Dublino) as a wedding present. They want him to clear out the land so they can exploit it. He in turn employs General Custer(Marcello Mastroianni) to run field operations who is in competition with Buffalo Bill(Michel Piccoli) for top billing. The movie successfully connects these events to present day imperialism, not only in the United States but also in France. Nixon is the President and his face can be seen everywhere while Pinkerton has places to be and governments to be overthrown.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
I'm surprised at the negative reviews from the 'Top' Critics of this. Seems like those who have panned it have rather misunderstood the intentions of this absurdist masterpiece - and I would have thought that they were declared pretty loud and clear! If you like Jodorowsky or the later Buñuel this is definitely one for you, a post-'68 condemnation not just of injustice, or colonialism, or oppression, but a big two fingers also to the hyprocrisy of bourgeois rationality itself. The role of the 'fool' who accompanies Sitting Bull seems pretty important here - someone who's licensed to say the unsayable and to throw (yes, really) rotten tomatoes in the face of authority. It seems that this is what Ferreri himself was setting out to do with the film.
As you can read from the other reviews here, the film is a re-location of the Battle of Little Big Horn (1876) to Paris, 98 years later in 1974, albeit with certain historical trappings (costume, most obviously) retained. But it's not an attempt simply to tell that 'story', nor is it some sort of didactic indictment of the Indian Wars. I don't particularly think it's about Vietnam either, as some others have said. It's anti-American, sure, but bear in mind this is just six years after the revolts of 1968 and anti-Americanism is not exactly uncommon in France at the time.
The film certainly is an attack, and a pretty clever one, on the 'progress' of capitalism, most obviously in terms of the inequalities bred by 'development' - whether that's the manifest destiny of westward expansion in the USA or the schemes and plots of property speculators in the contemporary city. The location Ferreri uses is the 'trou des Halles', the massive hole that was excavated on the site of Les Halles in central Paris, dug out for an underground rail terminus. The 'trou' is not just some symbol of a (historical) void, nor is it merely a big ugly scar in the centre of a city, nor even a cheap stand-in for a canyon (although a number of spaghetti westerns were apparently filmed there); in the last shot of the film, the 'balloon's eye view', it's hard to avoid a psychoanalytical reading: the hole as some sort of unspeakable, repressed carnality - the sex of the city (forgive me). And, if you bear in mind how immensely influential psychoanalytic approaches were in film-theoretical circles at this time, we can posit the idea that this is not just an interpretation that we might impose on the film, but one that may have been fairly obvious to Ferreri too. Both 'history' and 'sex' are subjects that are traumatic to confront, and which are consequently, albeit in different ways. repressed. I do believe that there's a lot going on in that big hole in the ground!
The title of the film is a pretty big hint to us here too, let's not forget. Ferreri mobilises permission to touch the white woman as a graphic and disturbing metaphor for the resentments between Mich and Custer (particularly in the sweatshop scene where Mich is about to rape a white woman, and at the end of the film where he lasciviously contemplates defiling Mlle de Boismonfrais's corpse). And when Mlle Boismonfrais literally gets it in the neck down in the 'trou', it seems to foreshadow the death that is awaiting Custer's men. And here we come to our other inescapable metaphorical combination: sex and death, or, "I warned you about going near that big scary crack.."
But there are more direct and topical references too, not so readily available to us today. The 'railroad shares', which underwrite the extermination of those Native Americans who stand in the way of progress, and the swift exit by the railroad men when it's apparent that things haven't gone as planned, parody the big mess that caused the 'trou des Halles' to be there in the first place, and which gave Ferreri the opportunity to make the film.
There's also a minor nod from Ferreri to fellow Italian Gillo Pontecorvo's major French feature The Battle of Algiers (which was made in 1966 but banned in France until 1971). As the battle progresses, the asthmatic General Terry stands on his balcony surveying it through his binoculars, just as Lt Mathieu looks over the Casbah in Pontecorvo's film. In Gen Terry's room, just as in Lt Mathieu's, the capitalists and politicians who are calling the shots listen for his analysis. There are other references to Algeria in the film too (but none, that I remember, to Vietnam).
Overall, Touche Pas à la Femme Blanche is a genuine coup de théâtre, a series of bold, funny, absurd gestures (the horses of the 7th Cavalry parading through the streets of Paris; the agent Pinkerton, in sweatshirt and jeans, hanging around the modern train station as Custer, in full uniform, disembarks from his carriage; the massed warriors of the Lakota and Cheyenne sweeping down from the streets of the 1er arrondissement into that great big nasty hole in the ground...) Great stuff!
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/04/23
Full Review
Audience Member
A scathing mixed historical retelling of the American genocide and the Battle of Little Big Horn. Leave it to the French to point out that racism in America and manifest destiny all fell neatly between the lily thighs of white women - the title's admonishment is one of the supposed prime movers in Custer's Last Stand.
Much like Cox's WALKER, the timeline and modern tropes (namely the magnetic eyes of President Nixon) that intrude seem to justify the community theater re-enactment and staging. The "surrealism" feels a bit forced and the movie drags on with its few points (American Imperialism is arrogant and stupid, therefore easily defeated) made over and over again before we are rewarded with some gore effects and a very dusty fight.
The cast is great, if under used.
This movie made Noelle so mad she had to take a bath.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/16/23
Full Review
Audience Member
This rating is for the omplete originality, audacity and craziness of this film. I picked this up on a lark while browsing my local film rental store and noticed they had just acquires a box set of the driector Marco Ferriri. I had never heard of him and the titles in the collection seemed very strange. I picked this one up because I was bored by the regular Hollywood offerings and I was at least hoping to be surprised. My wish was granted!
An experimental Italian director, makes a film about American Empire, in the streets of Paris, the characters dressed in period clothing, while the background is contemporar Paris, and the extras are filled by leading actors of the time. The two leads are Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve. It is a farce, it is unbelievable chaotic and at times ridiculous--but it is a wicked critique of empire then and now.
Could this film be made now (think of the troubles surrounding Southland Tales)?
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/24/23
Full Review
Audience Member
random and confusing but it did have it's funny moments.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/17/23
Full Review
Read all reviews
>
