La folie du jour

In the heart of the Roaring Twenties, Paris was a city hungry for the avant-garde and the exotic, a hunger that found its ultimate satisfaction in the form of Josephine Baker. La folie du jour is not a traditional narrative film but a meticulously captured record of the Folies Bergère revue that turned Baker into a global sensation. The film centers on a series of vignettes, most famously the 'Fatou' number, where Baker performs her legendary dance in a skirt made of rubber bananas. While the film lacks a linear plot, it operates as a visual fever dream of jazz-age hedonism, showcasing the athletic prowess of Baker alongside a cast of dancers like Leon Barte and Pépa Bonafé. It is a document of a specific cultural moment where the lines between high art and tribalist caricature were blurred, framed through the lens of Louis Lemarchand’s theatrical direction. The 'story' here is the birth of a modern icon, one who used the very stereotypes projected upon her to carve out a space of unprecedented agency and fame.