THE CARELESSNESS OF "BLACK GOLD"

~ Posted by Nicholas Barber, February 23rd 2012

All of the main characters in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s new film “Black Gold”, which opens in Britain tomorrow, are regal Arabs in the early years of the 20th century, but you wouldn’t guess that from the cast list. Antonio Banderas, who is Spanish, plays an Emir who’s offered a fortune by Texan oil prospectors. Freida Pinto, who is Indian, plays his daughter. An enemy sultan is played by Mark Strong, an Englishman with Austrian and Italian parents. And Strong’s son is played by Riz Ahmed, who is Pakistani-British. None of this may be quite as ridiculous as the sight two years ago of Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton in "Prince Of Persia" but, 50 years after Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn played Arabs in “Lawrence of Arabia”, it raises the question of what’s acceptable, and what isn’t, when it comes to ethnic casting.

The first rule rule seems to be that if you’re Caucasian—and a big enough star—you’re allowed to play anyone with a European heritage, hence Christian “pale” Bale could be a Greek fisherman in “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”. Black characters now have to be played by black actors, and Hispanic characters by Hispanic actors, but beyond that no one’s too fussy about the details: Benicio del Toro, who’s Puerto Rican, and Gael Garcia Bernal, who’s Mexican, can both get away with playing Che Guevara.

In order to acknowledge the multi-racial nature of modern western society, it’s now OK to turn white characters into black ones. In the last two James Bond films, Felix Leiter—described by Ian Fleming as a Frank Sinatra lookalike with “a mop of straw-coloured hair”—is an African-American, and Marvel comics’ Bond-like secret agent, Nick Fury, has also switched races, hence he’s played by Samuel L Jackson in the imminent “Avengers” movie.

But when it comes to Asian film roles, there’s a carelessness which feels less like positive discrimination than condescension. “Memoirs of a Geisha” had Chinese actors playing its central Japanese roles, while the Far-Eastern characters became distinctly pallid in M Night Shyamalan’s “The Last Airbender”. It won’t be many years before we find such casting as painful as Mickey Rooney’s notorious Chinese act in “Breakfast At Tiffany’s”.

Over all, the ethnicity of a supporting character doesn’t seem to ruffle too many feathers, but when a whole film is devoted to the exploration of a specific culture, then casting actors from different continents just seems wrong. It certainly seems wrong in “Black Gold”—although Annaud has a strong defence. The film’s funding came from Qatar, even if its actors came from far, far away.

Nicholas Barber is a film critic who writes reviews for the Independent on Sunday and previews for Intelligent Life.