L'action en noir et au féminin dans New York Taxi (Tim Story, 2004)

Abstract

Taxi (1998) is a French action comedy telling the story of a former pizza deliveryman who becomes a taxi driver at the beginning of the film. He is forced into helping a police officer of Marseille to defeat a gang of German bank robbers. The success of the film and of its sequels is mainly due to car chases in the streets of the city of Marseille. Its remake, New York Taxi (2004), gave the leading roles to the African American actress Queen Latifah and the white situation comedian Jimmy Fallon, shifting the male bonding relationship of the French version to an interracial pair. This shift also implied that the French film’s central focus on Frenchness is diverted, in the American remake, into a discourse on white masculinity. The aim of this article is to consider how the use of speed in the filmic construction of the female characters in New York Taxi (2004) is meant to construct the white masculinity of the film’s central character.

Keywords

• action films
• high-speed cars
• masculinity
• action heroines
• Queen Latifah
• transnational remake films