The film “The color of feelings”, released in 2011, did a lot for the international renown of the actress Viola Davis. However, a few years later, she will say to have done it. For what reason?
It is a role that brought her international reputation, but that, the years passing, she regrets having done. In 2011, actress Viola Davis embodied in the color of feelings the role of Aibileen Clark, a black governess in the 1960s who made the decision to publish her testimony against the decision of her employer. A story, obviously taking place with the backdrop of the painful question of racial segregation in the United States, and the movement of wrestling for civil rights.
This drama, signed by Tate Taylor and also led by the actresses Jessica Chastain, Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sissy Spacek and Octavia Spencer, received four quotes from the Oscars in 2012. It is this last actress who will leave the Oscar for the best supporting role, for a work which was a great success at the International Box, with more than $ 221 million collected for a budget of barely 25 million.
“In the end, it was not the voices of the servants that we heard”
That said, why would Viola Davis regret having made this film? She will explain it in 2018, in an interview with New York Times. “It seemed to me that in the end, it was not the voices of the servants that we heard.” she explained. “I know Aibileen. I know Minny. They are my grandmother. They are my mother.
And what I am sure is that if we want to make a film in which the main postulate is to understand what it was to work for whites and to raise children in 1963, I want to hear what it really did. I have never heard that during this film “ she continued. Which did not prevent him from greeting his colleagues in the film: “The friendships I have formed are the ones that I will cherish all my life. I had a great experience with these other actresses”.
“It was created with the Hollywood filter in a context of systemic racism”
In 2020, Viola Davis will again evoke the film at the microphone of Vanity Fairreturning in more detail to his previous declaration. “There is a part of me who always thinks that I betrayed myself, and that I betrayed mine, because I played in this film which was not ready to tell the whole truth. It was created with the Hollywood filter in a context of systemic racism. They [NDR : les producteurs] are invested in the fight to tell what it is to be black, but still in line with the expectations of the white public “.
Declarations that must be highlighted in a particular context; that of the Black Lives Matter movement; Social and political movement born in 2013 in the United States within the African-American community, which militates against systemic racism towards blacks.
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In 2020, the year of the new speech by Viola Davis, the movement will occupy an important place in the demonstrations and riots of the summer of 2020 in the United States and in the world, after the murder of George Floyd, who will then be revived by the death of other black men during their arrest by white police.
In a message posted on Facebook that year, Bryce Dallas Howard admitted that the color of feelings was perhaps not the best film to learn what civil rights was.
“I heard that the color of feelings was the most watched film on Netflix at the moment. I am so grateful for the exquisite friendships who were born from this film – our link is something that I dearly cherish and that will last all my life. That being said, the color of feelings is a fictitious story told from the point of view of a white character and was created by mainly white.
