When Josephine Baker arrived on the Paris Twenties scene as part of La Revue Nègre, “she made her entry entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs; she was being carried upside down and doing the splits on the shoulders of a black giant.... Somewhere along the development...as Josephine's career ripened, she appeared with her famous festoon of bananas worn like a savage skirt around her hips. She was the established new American star for Europe” (Janet Flanner, in “Paris Was Yesterday”)
The Baker personality that emerges in Marc Allégret's 1934 Zouzou is not the flamboyant figure of fame, but a youthful spirit filled with love and warmth. Zouzou is one of those rare musicals whose strength comes from the humor and pathos of its “offstage” story (in this way it resembles A Star Is Born more than the Warners-Busby Berkeley musicals to which it is compared). The rather remarkable story 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 from the laundry into a rags-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. He mixes the two in what are probably the film's finest moments (short of those in which Baker sings and dances), the scenes in the laundry, where lines of young women work playfully together - making risque jokes and supporting one another's emotional causes - photographed in a medium-shot intimacy reminiscent of the paintings of Degas.
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