This is an odd film. It builds on the real beauty of the island of Mauritius, implying a high level of realism. It's set during the period (most of the 18th century, up to the British takeover in 1810) of French domination (when it was known as the Isle-de-France) and depicts the horrors of its plantation economy, producing sugar off the backs (with a flogging depicted with sickening realism) of enslaved Africans, all of which is historically accurate. But the actors portraying the victims are from West Africa (primarily Wolof speakers from the area now known as Senegal, but other West African groups are mentioned), which is historically absurd, as the logistics of moving all those humans all those thousands of miles would have made no economic sense. (The enslaved population of Mauritius was of East African and Malagasy origin.)
These absurdities aside, and despite some outstanding acting, mainly by the two Senegalese protagonists, Ibrahima M'Bayi and Anna Diakhere Thiandoum, the plot is much too heavy-handed. Colette Cottin appears to be a fine actress, but casting her as white female hunter of escaped "maroons" is too preposterous to be sustained. Benoît Magimel , one of the finest actors in present-day French cinema, is here cast as a wealthy holder of a large plantation concession who has a few scruples about the fate of his enslaved workforce, but not too many. He has put on many kilos since he was last seen on U. S. screens in another island-based parable, Alberto Serra's "Pacification", a far superior (if often a little too enigmatic) film. Here, he is assigned a role just a step or two above a walk-on, a sad waste of his tremendous talent.
The film's intentions -- depicting the dynamics of enslavement on the many islands that produced sugar for the teacups of Europe -- are noble, and the world of those enslaved as seen from their perspective is hugely worthy of cinematic representation, but this film is too jejune, melodramatic, and uncomfortably situated between realism and nonsense. Are there really no Mauritian actors, speaking the island's form of Creole, that the producers had to bring in Wolof speakers from the opposite ends of the African world? The point may be that there are commonalities between the plantation system on Mauritius and on the Caribbean islands (where many of the enslaved would originally have been forcibly transported from Senegal and the rest of West Africa) that a bit of poetic license is permissible? But if I were from Mauritius, and a descendant from the groups that really were enslaved there (now a minority, whereas the island's current majority has its origins on the Indian subcontinent, whose ancestors were brought in by the British as indentured plantation workers) , I would feel insulted. Mauritius is a real place (of amazing beauty, as shown here), with its own specific history, and it deserves to be represented as such, not as an abstraction. The blurring of those two lines gives the film a silliness that the subject matter does not deserve, worsened by an overcooked and illogical screenplay in which the actors must struggle, with only intermittent success, to be more than gross caricatures.
