Vers Le Sud

Vers le sud

Vers le sud portrays the issues of sex tourism, the politics of oppression, and three women's escape from reality to obtain a fantasy of desire. This film follows the story of Brenda, a middle-aged woman from Savannah, Georgia, who travels back to a resort in Haiti to pursue Legba, a young Haitian male. Brenda is joined in the paradise hotel by two other women, Ellen and Sue. The quiet and breathtaking beaches which surround the women inside the hotel grounds at first give the impression of a peaceful island, yet soon later we learn that this is a fallacy; outside of the hotel Haiti is filled with destruction and violence.

The opening scene of this film takes place when Albert, the head waiter of the resort, is approached at the airport by a mother asking him to adopt her beautiful young daughter to enable her to escape the inevitable life that poverty in Haiti prescribes. When Albert rejects, the mother says to him, "it is hard to tell the good masks from the bad, but everyone wears one." Although Albert only plays the minor role of the film, he is used to emphasize the larger context of the US-supported dictatorship and its effects on Legba and other Haitians. Albert in a sense represents the dignified, hardworking, yet worn out spirit of the Haitians. In Albert's individual monologue, he informs us that his family fought against the Americans, and that his father and grandfather had the same racist opinion of whites. He wonders what they would think about him serving the white people as he does for his job at the hotel. I believe Albert is also used to demonstrate the contempt for America's economic imperialism; he notes that the American dollars have turned "everything they touch into garbage," which leads him to assert that "this entire country of Haiti is rotten."

The individual monologues extended throughout the movie present not