The Help – La Couleur des sentiments (2011) de Tate Taylor

I wasn't eager to see it in the first place. I heard too much about it. I don't like when people say “You HAVE TO see this movie!” That's the rebel in me that likes to think it goes against the flow :-)

I don't regret seeing it, AT ALL!!

Movies about this period kind of make me sick. To my stomach. Either there is too much of that “60s in the South of the USA white hatred and violence” and I am sick and even scared. Or there is not enough and everything is implied, so it's more violent. And worse with my running imagination I think far more worse would have happened in real life.

Trailer (bande annonce en vostfr)

Those times were scary and messed up. In the middle of the film, Medgar Evers, a Civil Rights fighter is killed. It is plain and simple terrorism. Gun the man down, so others would think twice before doing the same. It reminded me about Spike Lee's Four Little Girls documentary. About the racist bombing that killed 4 girls in a church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. It is the same sick thinking: bomb the church during Sunday school so kids won't dare taking the streets fighting for their rights and a future where they won't be treated as low class citizens.

I really liked "The Help" and above all laughed a lot. Those stories, those people, those situations were infuriating and hard to take, but it was balanced by the natural comic of all this. In the end this is just stupid nonsense. 

I liked the fact that all the national turmoil, the Civil Rights Movement about to achieve its highest, Dr Martin Luther King, even the death of John F. Kennedy; all was in the background but at the same time intensively present.

“You is kind, you is smart, you is important”

Those black women that took care of white children love them as their own. It made me think about this article I read about South Africa once. The same thing occurred. The kids loved the nannies that raised them, but they grew up hating and despising them as hard, even more. In the film it is interesting the relationship between the black maids and their white bosses they used to take care of. Maybe they knew and they felt how much those women were loved instead of the mothers.

A really good movie, that gives a different perspective without forgetting about the essential. The 60s in the United States were a very exciting, time of change, but change is difficult and can be very hurtful!

 One thing about the better of seeing a movie in Original Version: In French “white trash” isn't “plouc”. In American it is a denomination sometimes very full of hatred. In French “plouc” is just condescending and patronizing. Can be hurtful but in a “French way” passing it like humorous, but it is not as strong.