LAFAYETTE, La. -- A group of Cajuns reacted with disappointment and some good humor to a private showing of 'Southern Comfort,' a film that shows them fighting National Guardsmen to defend their territory in southwest Louisiana.
Cliff Aucoin of New Iberia called the movie, which stars Powers Booth and Keith Carradine, degrading to Cajuns, the descendants of French-speaking settlers who arrived more than 200 years ago.
He said scenes such as one depicting the boucherie, a social event centered on the butchering of a hog and its preparation into various foods, emphasized the blood instead of the food.
'I didn't care for it,' Aucoin said.
'I wouldn't pay to come back,' said Harold Domingue of Lafayette, who thought the swamp scenes -- filmed in north Louisiana because the real bayou country was too hard to work in -- were overdone.
The movie was 'all right but a little slow at times,' laughed Sen. AllenBares, D-Lafayette.
'The moral is, 'If you steal a Cajun's mudboat, he may get violent.''
In the last legislative session in Baton Rouge, Bares pushed through a ban on official use of the word 'coonass' to describe a Cajun. The term, of uncertain origin, is considered offensive by some Cajuns but a joke by others.
Hollywood columnist Jill Jackson, formerly of New Orleans, blasted the R-rated film as 'Southern Silliness' and insulting to Cajuns.
Booth, who won an Emmy for playing Jim Jones in the television movie of the Jonestown mass murder-suicide, said Cajuns had no reason to be upset.
'If anything, they come out winners,' he said. 'In the film we invade their territory. A member of our group is the culprit. They're merely protecting their own.'
No general release date for the film was announced.
