La banlieue: ses films et son hybridité

Five years ago, L'Amour, Philippe Faucon's first feature, a graceful, witty, and sympathetic account of the romantic entanglements of teenagers in a Paris suburb, seduced the New Director/New Films Festival audiences in New York. In the midst of all that praise, something bothered me. Maybe my American colleagues were misled by the English translation of banlieue as "suburb" which in the U.S. connotes manicured lawns, one-family houses, and white-middle-class affluence. So they didn't find it odd that, apart from a black teenager playing pool and two black women in the metro, the protagonists of L’Amour were white. I felt uneasy, cheated: at a time when American cinema had produced within a few years To Sleep With Anger, Paris Is Burning, and Do the Right Thing, French filmmakers seemed unable to deal with the racial and ethnic mix of their own national landscape.

Such is the searing originality of Hate (La Haine, '95), Mathieu Kassovitz's foray into the angst, anger, and powerlessness of three young men from the banlieue who uneasily try to cope with a barred future, police brutality, and the tantalizing yet forbidden proximity of Paris. Vinz (Vincent Cassel, who with his hatchet face and hungry eyes has become Hate's figurehead, and one of the most sought-after actors of his generation) is a working-class Jew, probably a Sephardi from North Africa; Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) is Arab, and Hubert (Hubert Kaoundé), black. They are friends--without the demagogic implications of similar situations in Larry Clark's Kids (e.g., the scene in which the protagonist's black buddy helps him beat up another black man). Instead of suggesting that for teenagers generational solidarity supersedes all consideration of race, Hate shows this interracial friendship as based on a common feeling of social exclusion.

The huge impact Hate has had in France--Best Director at Cannes; instant, controversial popularity--wasn't so surprising after all. The ethnic melting pot of the banlieues has become an infernal brew, and the bubbles that have

appeared now and then at the surface ("incidents" "tensions") are the symptoms of a long overdue volcanic explosion. When a majority of French voters recently elected a right-wing government, it was with the frightened hope of containing that explosion. Hate hit home because it articulated the narrative possibility of what everybody fears --or hopes: yes, the banlieue will burn.

French cinema had long neglected the banlieue; turning away from the populist tradition of the Thirties, it had in effect kept the working class invisible (except during the highly politicized post-'68 years). For, unlike its American counterpart, the banlieue is a dumping ground for the working poor. In the past decades, politics and real estate have conspired to exclude the workers and their neighborhoods from representation.

Although Paris was traditionally a city of workers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers, their displacement started under Napoléon III when Haussmann's grands boulevards cut through the poorer neighborhoods. The 1871 Commune revolt alerted the ruling class to the dangers of keeping "the people" within walking distance of their wood paneled residences. A systematic plan was hatched to push them farther and farther away, first to the "Red Belt" of Paris (so called because a high majority of its residents voted Communist), then to more distant outskirts. Deeply involved in real estate development, the politicians of the de Gaulle era put the final touch to the redistribution of social space in and around Paris, creating "mushroom cities" like Sarcelles that look like the seedy "projects" of Brooklyn and boast the ugliest buildings and the highest suicide rates in the country.

After the independence of Algeria in 1962, French industries organized a systematic, albeit illegal, import of unskilled laborers from the Maghreb, housing them in the working-class banlieues. These laborers first sent money to their families back home, then brought wives, mothers, children, and settled for keeps. French workers, already displaced by urban planning, felt invaded by these foreigners, whose cooking smelled odd and who accepted lower wages. A deep-seated, resentful, tenacious racism took root. The police systematically harassed young Arabs. Racial murders occurred. Violence escalated. The modern hell of the banlieues was born, culminating with the riots of the summer of 1990.

Godard was among the first to note the growing importance of the banlieue. The pun involved in the title of his 1967 film Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle is unavoidably lost in the English translation, "Two or Three Things I Know About Her": elle is the Paris banlieue as well as the central character of the housewife/ prostitute played by Marina Vlady. Later Godard went back to the same territory with Numéro 2 ('75), in which he dealt with the banlieue as a space of displacement, and again refracted the problem through the character of a woman: Sandrine, a refugee from North Africa, one of the working-class settlers who had to relocate after 1962. The banlieue started as a place where nobody was born. Now, a generation later, the children of those who were forcibly pushed into these dormitory communities are telling their stories--with a vengeance.

Are banlieue films a new cinematic genre? They are developing on already rich soil. With his 1984 feature Laisse Béton, Serge Le Péron (a former Cahiers du cinéma critic) portrayed the friendship between two young boys -- one French, the other Arab)--prone to juvenile delinquency in working-class Saint-Ouen. Jean-Claude Brisseau's The Sound and the Fury (De bruit et de fureur, '88) also explored the anguished confusion of young men lost in the violent outskirts of Paris. In 1993 Bertrand Blier directed Un deux trois soleil, the story of a rebellious young woman (Anouk Grinberg) in the working-class outskirts of Marseilles--a location all too often neglected by French filmmakers. While most Parisian narratives revolve around middle-class or intellectual characters, a salient aspect of the films shot in Marseilles is that they are solidly entrenched within a solid, colorful populist tradition. From Marcel Pagnol's trilogy Marius, Fanny, and César of the Thirties to Rendez-vous des quais ('55), Paul Carpita's militant movie about a strike on the waterfront, to Juliet Berto's Cap Canaille ('83), a noir exploration of the city, to Robert Guédiguian's Dieu vomit les tièdes ('89) and A la vie à la mort ('95), and culminating with Karim Dridi's Bye Bye ('95), Marseilles is defined as a utopian space where East meets West, where bodies and language follow a rhythm different from that of Paris.

Unlike their predecessors, the new banlieue films are usually shot from the point of view of their young protagonists--it is the city that has become strange, hostile, alien. Last year Hate, Jean-Francois Richet's L'Etat des lieux, Thomas Gilou's Raï, Malik Chibane's Douce France, and Dridi's Bye Bye cast a new look at what the French call métissage -- an untranslatable term that literally means, "inbreeding" but is used to convey a racial melting pot, something like "multiculturalism" with a more populist, sensualist, almost physical flavor. (Kassovitz's first film, in 1993 was called Métisse--i.e., "Mulatta.")

In Raï, Douce France, and Bye Bye, young Arab Beurs --that is, people born in France from immigrant parents--try to survive the ambient racism and the clash of culture between tradition and modernity. L'Etat des lieux follows a young French worker in a racially mixed environment. The focus of these films is no longer the essentially displaced woman or the misplaced intellectual, but the angry young man. The best translation for the working-class banlieue would be "the 'hood" of Spike Lee or John Singleton, with a touch of Marty Scorsese's mean streets. Not surprisingly, the banlieue films have a "woman's problem"; female characters are sacrificed to the efficiency of a male centered narrative.

With its stark mise-en-scène and non sentimental approach, Hate -- the best of these films--articulates the "degree zero" of the genre. By virtually eliminating women from its diegetic space, it is more honest than Raï: as in American 'hood films, its aim is clearly to delimitate a territory (urban, social, symbolic, filmic) for disenfranchised young males. Such is the intimate paradox of la zone, an alternative term for banlieue: a nowhere space, marked by rituals of exclusion, a place of transience where people get stuck, a "non-city" in which people cover large distances to end up where they started, a border between the glitter of the metropolis and a no-man's-land, a pocket of social stagnation and social unrest.

Hate starts with televised representations of an anti-police riot, triggered by the serious wounding of a young Arab, Abdel, in police custody, then unfolds over the next 24 hours--an uneasy day of boredom, frustration, and anger, a sleepless night of alienation, oppression, and rejection, and a dawn of mourning and death. Almost abstract black-and-white footage (warding off the illusion of realism as well as the temptation of voyeurism) follows the three youths as they uneasily, angrily, try to "fit"--and can't. Or won't. One thinks of the British word for unemployment: redundancy. Vinz, Hubert, and Saïd are redundant, and they are keenly aware of it. They could die tomorrow, like their friend Abdel, and it wouldn't matter. They can hang out illegally on the roof of a building and cook merguez (Arab sausages), exchange jokes, and be nothing more than an annoyance to local cops. They can go to the hospital to try to see Abdel, only to cause another disturbance and be ejected by a combination of cops and social workers. They can go to Paris, drink champagne at an art opening, but when they try to pick up girls they are so awkward, violent, impatient, offensive, that they get thrown out on the spot. They're not good at anything. They can't get the money that is owed to them by a man known as Astérix ("Snoopy" in the U.S. subtitles), or steal a car, or pull off a credit card swindle, or even leave a posh apartment building without being picked up by the cops. They can't go to Paris without being stranded there after missing the last train, or make the Eiffel Tower light up at a snap of the finger "like it happens in the movies." They're bums, they're lost, they don't matter, nobody cares.

Yet an old man cares, an old man met by chance in a restroom, who knows the ravages of racial and social hatred. He tells them of being trapped in a deportation train going through Siberia, and of the price paid by one of his friends for being stubborn in the face of oppression ("he froze to death")--but the kids don't get it. This episode, the most original of the film, anchors the young men's displacement in contemporary history. The trip to the Gulag is a signifier of other mass exterminations, from the Holocaust that is part of Vinz's collective history, to the slaughter of entire African villages at the time of colonization, to the ratonnades (systematic liquidation of Arabs) during the Algerian war: The "ridiculous" old man acts as a reminder that the presence of Vinz, Saïd and Hubert in the banlieue results from specific historical disruptions. This sequence sets Hate apart from other recent banlieue films, films that, in their genuine desire to express the essence of the present, and be in synch with youth culture, are often guilty of amnesia.

A case in point: In Raï, Thomas Gilou depicts a hell without history, while his first feature, Black Mic-mac ('86), was a refreshingly original comedy (penned by a black woman) about African residents fighting eviction in Paris. Gilou attempts to resurrect the linguistic magic of Black Mic-mac by using a colorful mixture of verlan (popular backslang, in which the order of syllables is inverted), imaginative dialogue, in-jokes, and North African rock music (known as "Rai"). Yet, maybe because of the number of screenwriters (no fewer than five, including the late Cyril Collard of Savage Nights fame), the film seems to lack conviction, or at least a real emotional center. Raï ends where Hate starts: when the police shoot the drug-crazed Nordine, who was taunting them from the roof of his apartment building, the projects of Garges-lès-Gonesses are set ablaze by a bunch of angry Beurs, including Djamel, Nordine's "good," hardworking brother. Meanwhile, the woman Djamel was in love with, Sahlia, packs her suitcase and leaves. Her character is obviously meant to embody the contradictions that burden the Beurettes, born in France and thoroughly modernized but having still to conform to the dictates of a patriarchal society. Yet Sahlia (played by former porn star Tabatha Cash) is the weakest element of Raï. Her character is unnecessarily sexualized and her revolt shown only in terms of a shallow form of sexual freedom (miniskirts, multiple partners, nude scene by a swimming pool exposing siliconized breast.)

Malik Chibane's Douce France offers a more sympathetic understanding of its female characters, and seems more interested in presenting the banlieue as a place of métissage rather than oppression. Indeed, unlike Kassovitz and

Gilou, who are white and not from the banlieue,Chibane and Bye Bye director Karim Dridi are insiders of North African descent. Chibane, while not blind to racism and unemployment--his first film, Hexagone ('94), also took the banlieue as its subject--is more interested in the genesis of an original hybrid culture influenced by Italian neorealism, Douce France casts a warm and subtle gaze on interpersonal relationships, such as the ironical friendship between a young Frenchman and an Arab, or the affectionate yet heavily Oedipal bond between a mother and her son. Yet it falls short in conveying the acuity of the dilemma faced by the Beurettes. Saoud wants to be free, which ultimately means living with a Frenchman, while Farida hides her hair under a traditional scarf, only to discard it after encountering a party of chador-wearing Iranian women. At a time when many immigrant Arab families face harassment for wanting to keep their daughters' heads covered in school, when female circumcision is still (illegally) performed in France for "religious" reasons, we might want to know more about a Beurette's choice--or renunciation--of fundamentalism as a way of life. However Chibane never loses his métisse sense of humor, as when he shows Farida, in full Islamic regalia, teaching French in a Jewish school to yarmulke-wearing children.

On the other hand, Karim Dridi's Bye Bye shows Marseilles as a city of

passage. At the beginning, the protagonist, Ismaël, and his younger brother

Mouloud arrive from Paris, to stay with their uncle's family before returning to the bled (Tunisian village) where their parents are waiting for them. They soon fall prey to the city's seduction: for Ismaël, a new job on the docks and a friendship with a young Frenchman, Jacky; for Mouloud, the lure of fast money with a local drug dealer who has seen too many American movies; and, for both, the warmth of an Arab family comfortably settled in the traditional immigrant neighborhood of Le Panier.

After the claustrophobic feel of his first feature, Pigalle (94), in which the red-light district of Paris was shown as a hotbed of crime and social marginalization, Dridi, who was born in Tunisia of an Arab father and a French mother, beautifully captures the diaphanous clarity of the southern light, the colorful flavor of the popular neighborhoods swarming with various ethnic groups. Not all is rosy, though, and Dridi shows the destruction of the temporary haven found by his protagonists: racial slurs and hostility from local rednecks, the pervasive encroachment of drug trafficking upon the Maghrebin community, Ismaël's own incapacity to face his demons and contain his desire for Yasmina, Jacky's Beurette girlfriend, and finally the betrayal of friendship soured by its racist overtones. Again, Yasmina's character is the most problematic: she's nothing but sex-appeal. If Ismaël's desires can be explained by a bout of macho identity crisis (it's hard for him to see an Arab woman sleeping with a Frenchman),

hers remain obscure. She is, ultimately, an ethnic femme fatale.

The female characters that really matter in the banlieue films are the mothers; onscreen as, I suppose, in real life, these powerful middle-aged women are the narrative emotional centers. Even in Hate, the female character given the most dignity and screentime is Hubert's mother. Though they endure patriarchy (like Ismaël's aunt in Bye Bye, who hides from her husband to smoke cigarettes on the sly), they are firmly ensconced in homes in which they impose a reign of benevolent terror. The young women, on the other hand, have neither space of their own nor family connection; their liberation consists in leaving the project or the Arab community or rejecting the traditional scarf. The price they have to pay for their access to modernity is a loss, while their mothers retain their traditional privileges.

Like their 'hood counterparts, the new banlieue films have a specific social agenda: they want to show under- or misrepresented communities (the working class, the immigrants), render visible characters hitherto excluded from representation. Echoing African-American feminist Michèle Wallace's question to Spike Lee, one may wonder: why is this fight for visibility so gender-specific? why does the access of angry young men to means of representation have to be paid by the misrepresentation of women?

L'Etat des lieux adds an interesting codicil to the genre. A low-budget flick shot in black-and-white Super-16 by a 26-year-old banlieue resident with a vocational school degree, it focuses on Pierre, a French lathe-turner proud of his proletarian roots and leftist politics. While paying more than lip service to ethnic hybridity--a rap clip by hip hop group Assassin, the hilarious exchange between two West Indian workers who speak a lingo so specific that it has to be subtitled even in France--director Richet believes that the word banlieusard has been used in the media to hide the concept of "prolétariat," and, behind it, the reality of class struggle in France. Played by Patrick Dell'Isola (an unemployed packer, and co-scenarist of the film), Pierre is not a victim but a man angrily conscious of his rights in the face of socio-political oppression. He loses his job after a quarrel with a right-wing co-worker who has attacked him for keeping Che Guevara's Guerrilla War in his pocket. He can't find another one because he refuses to kowtow to a snotty personnel officer. When faced with possible arrest, he weasels his way out of a tricky situation that would have sent Vinz, Hubert, or Nordine straight to jail--or to the morgue. He's a smooth talker in the know, capable of keeping right-wing vigilantes in check but also of engaging in passionate lovemaking with the wife of a friend without endangering his friendship or his conjugal peace.

While the ending of L'Etat des lieux - a love scene in a garage - unexpected and exhilarating, that of Hate has a tragic grandeur, quoting and subverting a situation à la John Woo's The Killer. Witnessing the shooting of his friend by a patrol cop, one of our three banlieusards pulls out a gun and points it at the cop's head. The cop does the same to his head. The image goes blank: we hear a shot but will never know from whose gun it came, who died first. Kassovitz's message is clear: it is French society as a whole that has a gun pointed to its head.

Meanwhile, the most recent installments of the adventurous French television series "All the boys and girls my age" have finally dealt with banlieue kids. Olivier Dahan's Brothers introduced Saïd Taghmaoui (Saïd in Hate) and Samir Naceri (later cast in Raï). A luminous surprise, Philippe Faucon's Muriel fait le désespoir de ses parents, follows the emotional wanderings of a 17-year-old from the banlieue (Catherine Klein) who is equally attracted to a white girlfriend and a young black man. The film takes this métissage and bisexuality as matter-of-fact: such is the reality faced by French teenagers of the Nineties. Maybe I shouldn't have worried so much about Faucon's first feature. The banlieue and its hybridity are here to stay in French cinema--either as a place to burn, or as a place to make love.

Magazine Collection: 83E3013

Electronic Collection: A18118953

RN: A18118953

Full Text © Film Society of Lincoln Center 1996.