Black Girl - Maggie Varga

The main point I got from the film Black Girl, is to be careful what you wish for. A cliche message, but I think its very relevant. Diouana wants more than anything to have this great life by working for a French family as a maid. She expects to have this extravagant, free life, but as it turns out she is completely wrong. She feels like a slave in the home. She has no freedom and is poorly fed, if fed at all. She had such high expectations for her future, and I think when she realized how wrong she was about the life she has, she found no other option than to kill herself. If this is the life she was looking for, and this is how she is treated once she found it, how could life get any better? Although it seemed like her suicide came out of no where, and she never expressed out loud how unhappy she was, you could tell that she was miserable working for that family. I'm sure she could have simply quit, or left, but if there was no where for her to go, what other options did she have? 

I think the mask symbolizes Diouana's life basically. She has her whole life in her hands in the beginning, with so much potential and opportunity. When she is hired by the French family, she lets them hang the mask on the wall, symbolizing that her life is in their hands. She has to walk past the mask each day, feeling like she is in no control of her own life anymore. It haunts her and essentially it mocks her. In the end, she takes back the mask when she kills herself, and takes her life into her own hands once again. 

On another note, I thought the music in the film was very distracting. In the beginning, I thought it was just intro music. It lasted a long time, even when people were speaking or having conversations. It took my focus off the actors and had me wondering when it would stop. It seemed like the same melody too, which may have symbolism. A routine pattern for the family could have been represented by the music. Their lives are boring and similar each day.