The white man is hell-bent on destroying and swallowing everything in his path. But it's so much more than that. This is towards the end of the white man's dominion in these parts. At least it feels like it, we know now, a century later that it didn't end there, and it probably never will.
A much tamer Triangle of Sadness. Especially the last part. There's some of that here, albeit a more quiet, subdued subversion of the "social order". Not complete, not even close.
It starts with the white being completely out of touch with the reality around them, but very much demanding complete docility. Agathe doesn't understand the telephone. But she is perhaps the least upsetting of the white characters somehow. She clings to the female attributes of the European upper class of the time, but is very much entrenched in this foreign culture. She accepts it and her place here in this social circle, bastard and all and is unwilling to leave it. So much so that she will do anything not to be taken away, not even from the factory where she claims she has no place as a woman. She is the most interesting character for me, together with Siti and maybe Karel.
The old man is done away with quickly. He is as loathsome as they can make a male colonizer and patriarch. Most tropes apply.
Siti sits between these two cultures and does a delicate balancing act between her abusive master, her stiff mistress who has mastered the art of sitting quietly in a room, doing nothing, her persistent suitor who rebels against the conquerors and dreams of a simple, but free life, her new masters who have their own ideas for the place and break down when confronted with reality, and her own son, Karel, for whose benefit she probably makes every decision, and who is also trapped on the border between the two warring cultures, never fully belonging to any of them. He is rejected, jeered at or kept at a distance by the locals and hated by his step-brother and his wife for who he is. I think Agathe is the only one who just accepts him for who he is and maybe lets him be. Karel himself has difficulty relating to the others, being encouraged by his father to act as a master with the locals. On the other hand he is despised by his white blood relatives.
There's a sizeable dose of dark humour and irony to the events, culminating in a monumental decision by Siti and a surreal, quite beautiful scene at the end.
