72 TheEconomistFebruary 8th 2020
1I
t is the long hot summer holiday in the
year that an ecstatic France has celebrat-
ed victory in the football World Cup. Issa, a
boy from the brutalist housing estates
north of Paris who shared that joy, has been
picked up by the police for theft. So far, so
banal. But it turns out that Issa stole live
chickens—and he took them to feed a lion
cub he has snatched from a visiting circus.
From this improbable, captivating inci-
dent, which reflects Issa’s boredom as
much as his naivety, flow a series of devas-
tating events that end childhood inno-
cence and expose the muscular friction of
daily life in the French banlieues.
Once in a while, a film of raw energy and
emotional authenticity emerges on the big
screen in France and shakes the cinematic
establishment. “Les Misérables”, which
was nominated for best international fea-
ture film at the Academy Awards on Febru-
ary 9th—and picked up the Prix du Jury at
Cannes last year—is an example. Co-writ-
ten and directed by Ladj Ly, a Malian-born
film-maker who grew up in one of the con-
crete estates in Montfermeil where the
movie is set, it follows a trio of cops and a
band of lanky boys. The sense of tracking
the action is made literal: when the run-in
between Issa (played by Issa Perica) and thepolice goes horribly wrong, the moment is
inadvertently recorded from above by Buzz
(Al-Hassan Ly, the director’s son), another
youngster. Buzz fills his empty days by fly-
ing a drone from the top of his high-rise.
The tension of the initial chase esca-
lates into a fast-paced, troubled quest by
the policemen to seize the video and cover
up what happened. In this, Mr Ly’s touch is
refreshingly even-handed. His camera
hovers over his subjects and their confined
neighbourhood like the boy’s drone. As the
film gathers pace, les flicsconfront each
other as well as their consciences, weigh-
ing self-preservation and team loyalty
against moral misgivings. Local Muslim el-
ders feature, but religion does not intrude.
For their part, the boys (pictured) veer be-
tween youthful exuberance—sliding glee-
fully on plastic lids into a concrete dump,
or staging water-pistol fights—and terrify-ing violence. In one scene, when the kids’
game collides with the cops’ patrol car, a
boy who looks no older than ten chillingly
holds the gaze of a policeman and draws
his finger across his throat.
Inevitably, critics have compared “Les
Misérables” to “La Haine”, a famously angry
monochrome drama released a quarter of a
century ago, which also features police vio-
lence (and few women) in the banlieues.
That film opened the eyes of a generation of
cinema-goers, more used to French art-
house movies shot in parquet-floored
apartments, to the angular bleakness and
rage beyond the capital’s périphérique(ring
road). Indeed, Mr Ly has acknowledged that
he, like so many others, was “greatly in-
spired” by it. If anything, and despite mo-
ments of wry humour, “Les Misérables” is
bleaker still. It dwells on the latent anger
and disorientation of a younger generation
of boys than its predecessor.
In some ways “Les Misérables”, which
takes its name from the novel by Victor
Hugo in which the former village of Mont-
fermeil appears, is really an action flick
that uses the banlieueas a backdrop. “We
didn’t think of it as a banlieue film as such,”
says Toufik Ayadi, one of the film’s produc-
ers, referring to the minor genre that has
emerged in France since “La Haine”. Rather,
says Christophe Barral, his co-producer,
the idea was to draw on the human stories
that happen to be so rich there. “There is a
much greater imagination”, he says, “just a
few kilometres from Paris.”
Yet the movie is also political, or what
the French call a film engagé. Mr Ly, the first
black French director to have his work
nominated for the Oscars, has described itFrench cinemaSounding the alarm
PARIS
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