Salamander

By quite some margin, Salamander is the earliest WLW film to feature an interracial relationship. That alone makes noteworthy. But beyond being noteworthy, is Salamander any good? Absolutely not. Everything in this film has aged like milk.

Salamander is mostly about the lead three characters having dialogue and opinions about world events and their own relationships. The first of these two characters are Uta and Ursula. Uta is a black model and Ursula, a photographer. They are on a working vacation in Tunisia. They’re more or less in a relationship when the film begins. However, it’s a bit nebulous as to whether they consider it a relationship or just gals being pals. Anyway, then Dr. Henry Duval enters the picture. He’s a psychiatrist and insinuates himself into the women’s lives. Henry’s presence begins to show the cracks in Uta and Ursula’s relationship and Henry himself tries to break them apart. By the third act, both Uta and Ursula are willing to throw each other over for Henry. Henry, meanwhile, is just around to stir the pot while he decides which woman he wants most.

I really wanted to give Salamander points for representation. But man, the film makes it hard. On the one hand, it’s cool that there’s a black female lead who’s portrayed as desirable. On the other hand, it absolutely veers into exoticism and objectification. Also, Salamander won’t stop patting itself on the back about its representation. Lots of dialogue is about race and Uta’s experiences as a black woman. But yikes! You can tell it was written by someone who didn’t actually talk to a lot of black people. Despite this, the movie maintains a really smug air of doing something risky and new by deigning to have a black female lead. Salamander doesn’t realize that while it’s a good start, it’s by far not interesting enough for a film to just show a black woman onscreen just living her life.

So much of this film is dialogue about issues regarding race, gender and sexuality. Sometimes it’s more specifically about Uta and Ursula’s relationship. But even then, there’s a suggestion that their relationship represents broader problems. Unfortunately, every take this film has on race, gender and sexuality is really bad! The film doesn’t respect women as people and doesn’t acknowledge homosexuality as something other than a perversion. But by far the worst aspect is the discussion about race. Multiple times in the films characters express how Uta is lucky or privileged to be black. Maybe this film was made in an alternate universe. Otherwise, I can’t imagine many places in the world in 1969 where it was a privilege to be a black woman. Reasons given are that it makes her exotic and interesting. Worst of all, Henry laments he has nothing to fight against whereas black people do. Wow, awful.

The most interesting part of the film is the ending. At the end, Ursula and Henry are ready to run off together. But Ursula finds them and stabs Henry and then Ursula. Good for her. I know there’s also negative representation in this scene involving a black character getting angry doing major crime. But honestly, good for Uta. Ursula and Henry deserved it and at least Uta showed some agency in the film.

But then, the film breaks the fourth all. The scene resets and the “director” says they’re now shooting the ending for the American market. The American market wouldn’t accept the version where Uta kills both Henry and Ursula. So instead they film a version where, “the white woman kills the negro”. It was a really interesting choice to suddenly break the fourth wall and do some commentary about what is allowed in films for an American audience or otherwise. Sadly, this comes too late. Even this bit of interesting film making still belies a smug attitude of being better than America for even having a black woman in film. Sure, Salamander, you get some points for having a black female lead. But you lost those points almost as soon as the movie opened when Ursula jokingly called Uta a slave.

Salamander is sort of interesting but it really is just a collection of outdated opinions for 90 minutes. I do have some respect for the director making this film at all. It was very low budget, yet he tried his best to make it visually interesting and have some artistic merit. But the reality is, this is a boring and racist film that’s just bad to look at.

Overall rating: 2.4/10

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