[English review] La Baie des Flamboyants

Adapted from a Mexican telenovela, “La Baie des Flamboyants” [t/n: “The Bay of Flamboyant trees”] is a soap opera broadcast between 2007 and 2010 on RFO (now available on Youtube). The critics (well okay, just my family who lives in Guadeloupe and the forums) that I heard at the time sounded more like the negative critics made against AB Productions' sitcoms of the 90s. The actors were bad, the plots had no realism... As if the South American telenovelas that Caribbean people, me first, are so fond of, could brag about having actors worthy of an Emmy and having great plots.

If it wasn’t the first time that a French TV series used Guadeloupe as a backdrop, the originality of “La Baie des Flamboyants” was to tell the life of the locals. Well, it tried at least, shall we say. It reinforced some stereotypes by leaving aside the visual richness of Guadeloupe, but above all by erasing or interpreting the class and race issues of the French-speaking Caribbean islands only from a metropolitan point of view. My comments are limited to the first hundred episodes. I didn’t have the strength to watch beyond Season 1. I won't dissect the many script inconsistencies because I don't have my sitcomology degree to do so with panache. What I’ll discuss here is the missed opportunity to lokalize [t/n: it means to create visual references] a French-style telenovela.

Impersonal backgrounds

When a series is set in New York, Miami or Paris, the viewer can usually figure out where the plot takes place thanks to familiar backgrounds that aren’t necessarily being part of their everyday life. It should have been the same with “La Baie des Flamboyants”, but every setting just shows Guadeloupe as seen by tourists who only go back and forth between their hotel room and the beach. I don't remember if the island’s name itself is pronounced during the first hundred episodes. The town of Saint-François is mentioned only two or three times. The rare outdoor scenes didn’t match the atmosphere they wanted to convey. For example, Ludovic (Nicolas Suret) and Cynthia (Murielle Hilaire) are in Ludovic’s car which breaks down in the middle of nowhere a few meters away from a traffic roundabout and walk "miles" by an empty road that is frequented by many cars passing by in the background. The winding roads of the Grand-fonds area would have been more appropriate to talk about "the middle of nowhere". Similarly, Cynthia's mother's best friend lives in a "low-income" neighbourhood, but her apartment is still well-furnished. The foreign hippie tourist who lives alone on the beach because she wants to find a connection to Nature... It's straight out of the AB tradition as the Westerner interpretation of the Robinson Crusoe myth...

As for interior decorations, they were neutral in the European style. Only Mr. Delerme's house, the Béké, had a semblance of antillanity (yes, I know, the irony of the situation) while the other houses had furniture that could have at least reflected the differences in social classes.

Social classes with no class

From the moment the choice is made to represent White people in a Caribbean context, the question of the symbolism of their presence on the island arises, especially when this character must be endearing with a story where he has been robbed off his fortune by a gold digger. Passing over the story of the White people in order to depoliticize the situation, meh that’s nothing new. It’s almost like I’m expecting it now. However, I think what threw me off me the most was the lack of flamboyance of the characters who were supposed to be really rich, who were supposed to spend a lot when they looked like they were from the lower middle class. For example, between Cynthia the Candy Girl, the nice girl who grew up in a single-parent family with financial struggle, and Johanna (Cindy Minatchy), the wealthy mean girl whose parents don’t take care of... It was hard to figure out their personalities because they dressed the same. It's not because we are in the Caribbean that there is no way to vary the light, casual, modern, sexy style.

None of the characters looked rich, except for Arthur (Gregory Templet), who drove an SUV once, and Alexia (Jessy Atty), whose scenes were usually in luxury hotel settings. And that's where “La Baie des Flamboyants” kind of "innovated". It created rich and confident Black characters. Problem was, they were the villains of the story... And I don't want to read colorism into it either. No really, I don't want to...

Black love, where are you?

... But since we’re on the colorism issue. One of the most virulent criticisms was about a predominantly light-skinned cast that wouldn’t be representative of Caribbean youth... Personally, I believe that the shade of melanin in the cast was coherent with how the parents irremediably established that a third of the teen characters were biracial. Let's be honest. There are very few dark-skinned characters in telenovelas and I don't think that Caribbean audience screams their disagreement on this biased representation of the South American population... In any case, they did with what they had and could very well have done with “La Baie des Flamboyants”, but to see so many interracial couples per square centimeter...

This isn’t even funny at this point. This is the umpteenth proof that happy love between Black people doesn’t exist for French television. That being said, Show doesn’t limit itself to interracial couples (with a White character) and 100% White couples. The very fact that teen/young adult characters are mostly played by non-white persons reduced the number of possibility to create interracial couples. It’s extremely rare that the main love triangle is exclusively non-white. Yet, here we are. Even if they go through the fauxceste trope, Cynthia and Christian (Siegfried Ventadour) love each other. Johanna is crazy about Christian but cheats on him with Arthur whom Isa (Luana Papa) is in love with. More telenovela than that, we can't.

Now before I end this article, I’d like to mention briefly Raphael (Anthony Le Mouroux) who is blind. I think that ableism is still much present in Guadeloupe, but I believe there’s an ongoing process of awareness that will lead one day to everybody feeling included in our society. I didn’t enjoy his storyline that much BUT B+ for the effort.

To sum up, “La Baie des Flamboyants” carries a double filter: the French vision of what a South American telenovela is and the metropolitan vision of what the Caribbean is. As I said in my introduction, I am talking about missed opportunity of lokalization and not failed localization. Missed because a series with so many episodes featuring so many Caribbean people had never been done before and who knows how long it will take to see one again. So it was an opportunity to make an impact in a positive way. The soap opera still had good ratings, but it was not intended to entertain by focusing on realism (even if staying within the same internal coherence of the story is the minimum we are once again being denied). Could it have gone deeper? Without a doubt. It’s not because it’s a telenovela that we cannot tackle themes such as racism, racial discrimination, segregation in a frontal way. The two most recent examples I have in mind are “Flor Do Caribe” (2013) and “Lado a Lado” (2012-2013), which romanticize but don’t ignore the impact of institutionalized racism. Should the soap opera have gone deeper? No. This level of misunderstanding of the Guadeloupean society dynamics (even if the scriptwriters would have been helped by locals) ran the risk of conveying such an misconstructed image if the plot had sought to deal with serious themes. It would have been all the more difficult to fight against such image for those trying to produce a Caribbean series with substance afterwards. This series, I'm sure, is being prepared by a production company somewhere.