Category: 20
All Genres: Romance, Drama
Release Year: 2001
Country: USA
Runtime: 100
Rating: (0)
Languages: English
Director: Peter Medak
Sound: Stereo
Taglines:

  • Born into one world, destined for another.
  • Caught between privilege and oppression…


    • Writing by: Anne Rice – (book)
    John Wilder – (teleplay)

    Produced by: Peter R. McIntosh – producer
    Anne Rice – executive producer
    Bart Wenrich – co-producer
    Forest Whitaker – executive producer
    John Wilder – executive producer

    Cast: Robert Ri'chard – Marcel Ste. Marie
    Peter Gallagher – Philippe Ferronaire
    Gloria Reuben – Cecile Ste. Marie
    Jennifer Beals – Dolly Rose
    Ossie Davis – Jean-Jacques
    Ruby Dee – Elsie Claviere
    Pam Grier – Suzette Lermontant
    Jasmine Guy – Juliet Mercier
    James Earl Jones – Older Marcel
    Eartha Kitt – Lola Dede
    Ben Vereen – Rudolphe Lermontant

    Music: Patrick Seymour
    Official Website: Visit Website


    Plot Outline: Set in nineteenth-century New Orleans, the story depicts the gens de couleur libre, or the Free People of Colour, a dazzling yet damned class caught between the world of white privilege and black oppression.
    Plot: Magloire Dazincourt, the owner of Bontemps, the largest sugar plantation of the entire South, asks his favorite cousin, Philippe Ferronaire, to marry his daughter Aglae Dazincourt and take over most of its management and family, including his colored mistress Cecile Ste. Marie, for whom he has a cottage build in New Orleans. When Magloire dies, Philippe becomes her lover and the father -not in law- of her son Marcel, named after his own father though, and promises her to get the boy educated in racially egalitarian Paris from age 18. However while still living in the decadent creole society in New Orleans, Marcel Ste. Marie gets in touch trough a colored carpenter with both his white and black roots, both of which bloodlines suffered greatly in the bloody racial civil wars on Haiti, a subject the American society refuses to deal with publicly, and the more people he gets to know or hears their past, the more he gets aware of social and racial matters. Then his father Philippe gets in grave financial problems and decides to marry off his daughter to the son of a black businessman while committing the dreadfully disappointed Marcel to a two year training as local undertaker…

    Movie Quotes: Carmen Naranjo: Do you know why we clink glasses before drinking?… It's so that all the five senses are involved. We touch the glass. We smell the drink. We see its color. We taste it. Hearing is the only sense that doesn't participate unless we create it.


    Crazy Credits: We know about 1 Crazy Credits. One of them reads:
    A second ending begins at the end of the closing credits: At school, the little boy Jun had finished his bug collection, and his teacher tells him to put it back in his lab. Once he does just that, an earthquake shakes the school, and looking through the window in the school lab, Jun hears a familiar monster roar!

    Goofs: We know about 1 goofs. Here comes one of them:
    Anachronisms: The events of the movie are happening in the 1950s, around the time of decolonization, yet the prince Victor appears to be flying a 1982 model of Cessna 172.

    Trivia: There are 2 entries in the trivia list – like these:

    • The food that Martin Naranjo cooks was prepared by Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger who run restaurants in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
    • The three poems that Leti's “secret admirer” sends her are “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell, “Her Face, Her Tongue, Her Wit” by Arthur Gorges, and “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick. The last note is from Titania's speech in Act III, Scene 1 of Shakespeare's “A Midsummer Night's Dream.”