![]() Patsey is not portrayed tragically, but heroically. She is not defeated-and, because neither he nor the camera looks away from her torn-up body, something in Solomon is saved. The scene in which she is stripped naked, tied to a tree, and has welts torn in her back is the most painful in the movie (and true to the book, in which Northup writes that she was “literally flayed”). In his book, Solomon makes this point about the real Patsey, and the movie conveys it in a quick, beautiful scene of her making corn-husk dolls, her fingers flying. She does not do it out of loyalty, but, as with the dance, it is a living delight in her own quickness. But he learns the true terms of this arrangement from Patsey, “the Queen of the Fields,” as Epps, the planter, calls her she picks five hundred pounds of cotton a day, when Solomon cannot manage two hundred. Solomon is beaten and threatened with death from the moment of his capture. “Jezebel” begins to pose one of the central questions that “12 Years a Slave” fully engages in: What does sex have to do with slavery? What does intimacy have to do with violence? In the absence of freedom, everything. It might have helped if Davis had played Scarlett she might have brought a sense of the sensual rot of plantation life. The film was made largely for Davis, who got the role of Julie-the bad Southern belle-as a consolation for not being cast as Scarlett O’Hara, in “Gone with the Wind.” That film overshadowed “Jezebel” and, for a long time, all movies about American slavery more recently, it has lost its grip, both because of the cartoonishness of its black characters and its tinny, dated artifice. Bette Davis, as Julie, is mesmerizing, but it’s hard to sympathize with a character who flirts by agreeing that William Lloyd Garrison should be hanged. “Jezebel” is a strange movie, at turns beautiful and ugly. Julie’s Aunt Belle asks if it is her first time in the South:Īmy: Yes, it’s beautiful-strange and beautiful, and a little frightening.Īmy: Because of its strangeness and beauty, I suppose. When Amy arrives at Halcyon and a slave opens the door, she looks at him and flinches, just a bit. “12 Years a Slave” does so with a novel bravery-which is all the more striking in that it’s based on a book that’s a hundred and sixty years old. “Jezebel” does so in a way that is ultimately cowardly, not to say creepy. More than many films about American slavery-certainly more than “Gone With the Wind”-they engage with the poisoned intimacy in the relations between blacks and whites in the South. The movies bear watching together, and not just because they are set in the same state and years. But the distance between Amy and Solomon is a measure of how radical, and powerful, “12 Years a Slave” is. The visitor might be a carpetbagger, a Union colonel, or a Philadelphia detective. Amy, like Northup, is the “visitor from the North,” an archetype in films about the South. In the movie “Jezebel,” Amy comes south because she has married Preston, a New Orleans banker who was once engaged to Julie (who is now deranged by jealousy). Solomon Northup was a New Yorker who ended up on a series of Louisiana plantations after being kidnapped in 1841. The mistress of the plantation looks at how her husband is watching Patsey, and then reaches for a heavy crystal decanter, which, with abrupt violence, she throws at Patsey, knocking her to the ground. Then Patsey, a young woman played by Lupita Nyong’o, raises and twirls her arm in a gesture whose vivacity could never be choreographed. Northup, who plays the fiddle, might as well be Orpheus. ![]() ![]() They move like dancers in a dream, half ritual and half gloom. Edwin Epps, a planter, has dragged his slaves out of bed to make music and dance for him and his wife. There is a scene, similar but transformed, in “12 Years a Slave,” the new movie directed by Steve McQueen and based on the memoirs of Solomon Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor.
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