When Josephine Baker arrived on the Paris Twenties scene as part of La Revue Nègre, her erotic stage spectacle quickly merged with her exotic offstage persona to make her the symbol and the pet of the Jazz Hot generation. The Baker personality that emerges in Marc Allégret's 1934 Zouzou, however, is not the flamboyant figure of fame, but a youthful spirit filled with love and warmth. Zouzou is one of those rare musicals strengthened by the humor and pathos of its “offstage” story, which here has as its subject interracial love, treated in an oblique way. Two children, a black girl and a white boy (Zouzou and Jean), are presented by their white adopted father as a circus sideshow (racially-mixed “twins”). They grow up to be Baker and Jean Gabin; he joins the navy, she becomes a laundress, and the family remains held together by an enormous affection, which turns to amorous feelings on the part of Zouzou. It is in order to save her adopted brother/would-be lover that she allows herself to be catapulted into a laundry-to-riches stage success.
Allégret's direction allows for both the undiluted love of the family scenes and the bawdy boudoir humor of stage life. Though it features Baker as her “offstage” self (and Gabin in pre-star, pre-Prévert flexibility), Zouzou refers in subtle ways to La Baker's role as a symbol of “le jazz hot”: in opening shots of two junior voyeurs peeping through the circus-tent window at young Zouzou; in her first dance projected against the wall in larger-than-life shadow; and in her magnificent stage entrance, locked in a cage and singing like a bird for her lost Haiti. --JB