So there I was, enjoying seeing Liam Neeson (purr) as ex-spy/preventer/CIA-superman go Protective Daddy (purr) and track down the people who abducted his daughter, and then...
...the
final boss last bad guy Protective Daddy has to take down is a sheik. Because it's not enough that the plot revolves around the fact his daughter was abducted by an Albanian sex-trafficking ring and then sold "certified pure" at an auction. No, she has to be bought by an agent of a sheik. Ah, but penny, those who have seen the movie say, Neeson's character
makes the sheik's agent buy his daughter. To which I say, the Movie Powers That Be could have had Neeson's character enter any bidder's booth oh-so-cleverly disguised as a server. They chose that particular booth. Why? The conclusion I came to isn't flattering (it's a racist decision) and sadly...
...a movie that could have been fun escapism with a few added bonuses (Famke Janssen as Neeson's ex-wife doesn't get a lot of screen time, but it's nice to see a woman who's actually old enough to be the mother of a 17-year-old playing the mother of a 17-year-old) was ruined.
my purr is now a grr :-(
It took me, at most, about ten minutes of Wikipedia research to determine that Albania is a major trafficking center and that the Middle East is one of the primary destinations for slaves. And it's not hard to see why: Eastern European countries have weak central governments, porous borders and widespread poverty; Middle Eastern countries have high numbers of wealthy people and low government transparency. Of course, those aren't the only places where sex slavery happens, but they're pretty damned common, so I don't see what's explicitly racist about using them.
If every recent film involved Middle Eastern buyers then you might be onto something, but apparently that's not the case.
My problem is with the Arab buyer at the end. Of all the potential buyers the film's scriptwriter, director, and producers could have gone with, they chose the Arab. Why? The plot didn't demand it. All the plot demanded was that her buyer be rich. Well, rich and willing to buy a virgin.
Were the filmmakers playing on the easily-identified Arab Oil Sheik trope? (It's a little different in the film -- this sheik is a rich old man.) Were they internalizing the recent trends of anti-Arab and anti-Islamic activity in France*, so when it came time to think up one last villain, out popped our sheik?
I don't think the filmmakers deliberately set out to be racist, but that doesn't mean their choice wasn't racist.
* Country specified because the director and producer of the film are French, and the majority of the film is set in Paris.
Rich and willing to buy an American virgin. A smart buyer would want to choose a sex slave who wouldn't be tracked down very easily, because she comes from someplace that's some major cultural and physical distance away. So American and Western European buyers would be more likely to purchase Eastern European and Asian women, while Middle Eastern and Asian buyers would be more likely to purchase an American woman. We're dealing with probabilities, not certainties, because not all buyers are smart, and circumstances differ; but the probability of a Middle Eastern (or Asian) buyer does shade upward.
This being, as you said, an escapist film, it's certainly not a choice that explicitly challenges people's preconceptions. But neither is it anything approaching an implausible choice. If I had to rank-order the likely regions of origin of the buyers, white people from anywhere would come up no better than #3, after the Middle East and East Asia, for the simple practical reasons I've already enumerated.
Shit, if this is a racist film, I guess that makes me a racist apologist. Time to chuck my Pamuk novels in the bonfire and join the join the John Birch Society!
I would say that the way the sheik is actually depicted (which I don't know) is far more pertinent to your charge than the simple fact that he's one of the villains.
From where I'm sitting, you haven't unpacked or checked your privilege. The idea that privilege can be condensed down to one factor -- economics, like you argue in the "Wise as Serpents" thread -- is laughable, as is telling me I'm trivializing what racism is. Pointing to some big examples while ignoring the "invisible"* examples ingrained in our society is what trivializes racism (and every other -ism...the Venn diagram of privilege is complex). Those examples are why we have sterotypes like the evil Arab villain out to steal our daughters' virginity. And very few people with privilege blink an eye at them because they don't have to.
* read: "invisible to those with privilege" because it's face-slapping visible to non-privileged groups.
(Hottest part of the film for me is the bit you see in the preview where he tells his daughter's abductors he will find them if they don't let her go.)
I wish I was every one of the women he has sex with on screen in Schindler's List.
An example of the kind of review that I read before posting my earlier comments is Roger Ebert's, which is lukewarm but doesn't mention any of the issues that the reviews coming out this weekend do, or that you did. Suddenly, when I come back to look a week later, they're spotlighted in most of the reviews. The Rotten Tomatoes score fell 25% over the last four or five days. I can't explain it, and don't really care to. All I know is, if that's actually what this film was, it pisses me off that any of the reviews were positive.
-Rikku
Later I asked my dad, "If you had known that over the course of its lifecycle, from the factory to the incinerator, vinyl produces a wide array of deadly pollutants that threaten our future with a global toxic crisis, would you still have put it on the house?" "I hope not, honey," he said. "But they didn't write that on the box."
...
*goes to fetlife*
RikkuHakumei removed PVC from their list of fetishes.
:D
...And now I am glad I'm not all that into PVC. I always make the mental association with conduit, and that makes me think about work, and suddenly, I'm thinking about hot linemen and pipefitters, and suddenly, I'm in a totally different fantasyland. :D
If all a viewer wants to see is Nesson doing bad things to the people who abducted his (sweet, virginal) daughter and then swooping in to save her at the last moment, the movie delivers. Kind of shakily, and the setup requires mental gymnastics. For example, I had a hard time swallowing the ex-wife and stepfather would let the 17-year-old daughter follow U2's tour around Europe with her 19-year-old friend. Given how lenient the two were as parents, I could have bought that they sent someone to follow the girls at a distance (stepdad certainly could have afforded it), but then the writer & director would have to "waste" time eliminating that character so Nesson could do his lone wolf thing. Or so says the movie-logic hat I was wearing in the theater. ;-)
So yeah, the movie has a lot of bad. Some of it works in the movie's favor, at least for me. Since I'm safely in fictional-land, I actually liked that Nesson's character didn't care about other girls caught up in the sex ring and that he shot his "friend's" wife to get information because to me, it showed just how one-track he was. Nothing matters except his daughter. Nothing. It's a character flaw, no doubt, but it's a flaw I can and often do enjoy when it comes to fictional vigilanteism.