European cinema “has still got it” per guest essayist Emilie Bickerton in last week’s Times.[1] Like her, I’m lifted by the prospect of new films by the Dardenne brothers and Mia Hansen-Love. Other films/directors she cites sound lively too. Yet Ms. Bickerton may have missed the most galvanizing French cinema of this moment. When a worldly friend heard I’d been to Paris last summer, he commended “wild” new movies based on life in banlieues on the edge of the city. (“You’ll want to head right back to see what you missed!”) The movies that moved him were made by filmmakers in Kourtrajmé (slang for “court métrage,” or “short film”)—a collective that includes Romain Gravas (son of Costa-Gravas) who has directed two fast and furiously French features, The World is Yours and Athena (both available now on Netflix). If you’re ready to catch Kourtrajmé’s New Wave, though, I’d start with Ladj Ly’s Les Miserables.
This film about flics and other local lords presiding over flummoxed parents and kids in a hard suburb of Paris, which shocked Macron (“How could he not know?” mused the director), doesn’t lead with a bleed. It gets you open with scenes of public joy. Parisian streets are watching and then celebrating France’s World Cup win in 2018. Two rapt black boys, Buzz (Al-Hassan Ly) and Issa (Issa Perrica), have metro-ed into the city, joining the fête near the Eiffel Tower. What’s on screen synchs with what Ladj Ly witnessed at age 18 in 1998 when another World Cup winning team of different colors and creeds began teaching the world (and their own country) France was multicultural: “I’m a little older than the characters of the film and 12 July 1998 marked me for life. I remember it to this day.”[2]
No doubt he’s aware Marine Le Pen and neo-fascist nativists don’t want such memories hanging around. She gabs about making France “more French.” Black-and-Beur Paris crowds at the top of Les Miserables are director Ly’s come-back: These people are France.[3]
Ly’s scenes of happiness—worthy of the tableaux of revolutionary fêtes in Michelet’s History of the French Revolution—are among the most exalting I’ve seen in any movie. Les Miserables, though, isn’t misnamed. The brown boy in the middle of that mass high will be taken down to a bottomless bottom. Issa sets the film’s plot in motion when he steals a lion cub from a local Roma circus. (When Ly was a kid, he pulled the same prank.) Having upset the shaky equilibrium among those who rule the projects and markets of the district where he lives—cops, gypsy king, a local political boss, drug-dealers, Islamists—Issa ends up at their mercy. He’s scarred for life by a cop, terrorized by Roma (exacting psychic payback) and then forced to say: “It was my fault.” When I watched his false confession—the absolute negation of the film’s affirmative opening act—it was like witnessing the murder of a heart. I can still feel it. And the pain on screen is fully earned. Ly is a soul brother not a sentimentalist. I wouldn’t be surprised if Les Miserables’ scene of self-rebuke was scripted in solidarity with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ message to the grassroots in Between the World and Me—“What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility.”[4] Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but as with the police killing of Prince Jones—the atrocity behind Coates’ open letter of protest—the first vector of state violence in Issa’s case is a black cop. Afro-French auteur and African American author share clarity about where to put the blame. Per Coates: “I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth.” Ly means to hold his own country accountable too.
Early on in Les Miserables, a one-of-a-kindly cop arrives from the provinces with fresh eyes to help the audience assess bad and worse actors in the banlieue. He’s no superhero, though, and the movie exposes the fantasy individuals on their own can tame the wild side of the city. Ly’s banlieue blues p.o.v. doesn’t mean he gives powers-that-be a pass due to his tragic sense of life. Yet he lives to comprehend not to condemn. He won’t squeeze people into moralizing molds. Take the film’s portrayal of the local bully-pol known as “The Mayor.” He comes across as a wannabe Big Man, until we see him for a second on an outing with a mentally challenged infant (his son?). Caregiving doesn’t excuse self-dealing but it adds a human complication to his character.
Les Miserables is defined by Ly’s empathy and aim-is-true objectivity. An early scene hints at his knack for overviews that aren’t removed from interiority. A drone takes flight, giving us a bird’s-eye (or divine?) view as it soars above a housing project. The drone is directed by the boy Buzz (played by Ly’s son)—a nerdy kid who’s always filming his surround just as Ly did when he was a young cam-boy. Buzz is no goodie; he uses the drone camera to spy on girls in their bedrooms until they find out he’s been peeping and force him to delete the footage (and shoot their basketball practice instead). The girls lay down their own law, knowing they can’t rely on their immigrant parents to protect them in projects where elders tend to be less at home than kids.
The high-rise apartment houses in Les Miserables are in the commune of Montfermeil, where Victor Hugo set a section of the 19th Century epic that gave Ly’s film its title. The movie’s most conscious cop probably speaks for Ly when he wonders if the gritty essence of the place has changed much since Hugo’s time. The legend gets the last word; Ly’s Les Miserables signs off with lines from Hugo’s: “Remember this, my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.” An epigram that punctuates a riot—led by Issa—in the project. The implication is that the French state will face insurrections until it becomes a better cultivator of its poorest citizens. Ly isn’t out to spark burning and looting, but he loves his rebel-boys. Les Miserables leaves us with Hugo’s thought-bubble over a freeze-frame of a weaponized Issa in a project stairwell on the verge of taking out cops.
This ending out of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (or Lindsay Anderson’s If) may not work perfectly since the envisioned return of the repressed breaks with the film’s documentary-style realism, yet its tease comes to fruition in Athena. Ly helped script that film with director Gravas. Based in part on events during the 2005 Paris riots in the banlieues which Ly documented in the moment, Athena images opening acts of a new civil war in France.
I’ll come back to Ly’s and Gravas’s grave collaboration, but first a word on Gravas’s serio-comic This World is Yours, which brings home with brio Kourtrjame’s credo that “The People” in 21st C. France are often people of color. This World is Yours mixes up black and tan French lumpen with Asian woman gamblers, Scottish drug-pushers, a Jewish lawyer, a group of 20 bleached-blond Congolese et al. The film’s funky maghrebi scenarios feature a straight man’s belly-dance for femmes, a karaoke singalong of Toto’s shitty “Africa,” and a live grenade in a Hello Kitty backpack. It all fits thanks to glossy cinematography and pacey plotting. Gravas isn’t afraid to use trad star power as well. Echt French actress Isabel Adjani (playing off her Algerian descent on her father’s side), plays Dany—dashing safe-cracker mother of the film’s pudgy anti-hero from a banlieue.
Her son François (Karim Leclou), a small-time drug-dealer, has plans for a new life as CEO of a small company distributing ice pops in North Africa. When he discovers Dany has gambled away funds he needed to go legit, he agrees to do one more Euro-drug deal with a psycho sociopath named Poutine. (Glory to Ukraine! And good on Gravas for rootin’ against Putin in 2019!)
The title of Gravas’s flick comes from a hip hop track by American rapper Nas that’s also a nod to a scene in DePalma’s Scarface. Like DePalma’s heir Tarantino, Gravas is a movie-mad pop lifer who isn’t above making fun of spectacularly dumb gangsters, but kindness at This World Is Your’s core distances it from Tarantino-land (and makes it something like an anti-Scarface). Francois is a polite son of a…mom who tells him to cheat others before they cheat him, but he resists (gently): “I’m not out to fuck anyone.” What he wants is a cookie-cutter house (with a micro-pool) where he can T.C.B. with his crush Lamya (Oulaya Amamara)—a spunky Muslim femme fatale who’d rather be a good wife/girl boss. Gravas grasps his underdogs’ pursuit of happiness isn’t contemptible even if it’s “neo-liberal.”
Not that his World amounts to a simple bow to the way petty bourgeois live now. Suburbia looks sweet to lovebirds Francois and Lamya since they’ve escaped from banlieues (and the fool’s paradise of gangsters).
Gravas is a storyteller not a critical theorist, but his dialectical imagination subtles up on you during his film’s most piquant episode. When Lamya woos a savage Scottsman at a Karaoke bar by singing Toto’s white-bread “Africa,” Gravas doesn’t direct the scene like a culture cop. Nobody is meant to hate on Lamya for her iffy taste, but you don’t have to sing along with the Scottish scumbag who’s revved up by “Africa’s” pale exoticism. (A puke reaction is permissible!)[5] The scene may seem Tarrantinoesqe, but Gravas’s cinema doesn’t reduce pop life to hip life. He wants your ear to travel. His World is bigger than Tarrantino’s. It’s more in tune with reporting in, say, Carl Wilson’s tribute to Celine Dion, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. World’s “Africa” scene reminds me of Wilson’s account of how Jamaican gun men would shoot out the lights in dance halls when DJs got around to playing their favorite diva. (Pace Dion fans, I know the voice that got those guns off is more rousing than Toto’s blando radio staple.) Gravas’s pop moves are all about sound effects in social life.
There’s no pop stuff on the soundtrack for Athena, the film Gravas made with Ladj Ly, but the movie gets a charge from its original, electro-choral score composed by a French musician and DJ, GENER8SION. His mood music fits the movie’s doomy futurism. Athena depicts a familial struggle between three North African brothers caught up in an uprising after their younger brother is murdered on video by right-wing provocateurs in police uniforms. Like Les Misérables, Athena has an unforgettable opening sequence but here the rush is all about ire, not joy. A ten-minute uninterrupted one-shot wonder introduces you to brothers-at-arms. Dutiful cop, Abdel (Dali Benssalah) announces the murder of his youngest brother at a press call and gets met by a Molotov cocktail thrown by his other younger brother, Karim (Sami Slimane). As it ignites (along with the film) the camera follows Karim and his crew as they commandeer guns and police vehicles, racing them across the city back to the makeshift fort they’ve built at the massive Athena housing complex (named for the Greek goddess of wisdom and warfare).
The film puts a post-millennial spin on mythic universals—brotherly love and hate, good cop gone mad, Antifa goes international, Islamism as nihilism, death and life in tower blocks. I watched a dubbed-into-English version (by mistake) but that didn’t kill the film’s local sensations. Neighborhood lore is in the picture, along with brutalist architecture of projects in the French commune of Ensomme. The Kourtrajme collective’s community art aesthetic informs Gravas’s approach in Athena, “90% of our cast is made of people from the neighborhood, we almost got everyone involved, from the cast to the catering and the set design.”
Kourtrajme’s culturalism engenders artful technical stretches as well as social engagement. It’s bracing that a son of Costa-Gravas has chosen to roll with his comrades’ collective will to film. Ly’s arrival is even more inspiring since he seems sui generis—a self-created brother from the banlieue. He’s talked up his ties to Montfermeil, where he grew up and still lives. In a Sight and Sound interview, he marked himself off (modestly) from other members of the Collective who live closer to the center of Paris. He looks forward to making films about Montfermeil for “at least ten more years.” I can’t hardly wait.
NOTES
[1] Opinion | European Cinema Has Still Got It – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[2] Ly isn’t dim about the role of national teams in the society of spectacle. He didn’t resist right away when a Guardian interviewer, citing analysis in Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague, pointed out how sporty triumphalism creates “an illusion of fraternity, celebration and joy of being together…” “I think that’s right,” Ly allowed. “Football is the new opium of the masse.” But he wasn’t ready to forsake his memory of ‘98 (or ’18): “[F]or a moment it was magic.”
[3] A call and response that came through to reviewer Glenn Kenny: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/28/movies/les-miserables-review.
[4] A little more circumstantial evidence in case my link seems USA-centric. Coates’ book was published in France as Une colère noire, literally A Black Anger, two years before Ly made Les Miserables. Per Wiki, “French Congolese novelist Alain Mabanckou prefaced the essay, giving the text the cachet of one of the most visible writers working in French today.” My guess is Ly read some Coates sometime before he scripted Les Miserables.
[5] “Africa” belongs somewhere in the “settler colonial” soundscape limned by Eric Lott here.