Well, this was not what I was expecting, the humour, for example, and the terrific way it is filmed.
The day after a riot in the banlieues, sparked by the beating of an Arab in police custody. Three multi-racial friends, Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé and Saïd Taghmoui go into Paris to get some money and experience strange episodes in an art gallery, with an old man who was a prisoner in Siberia, a gang of skinheads and a deranged cokehead. But in the most telling and awful sequence, Saïd, who has remarked that 'the police here are so polite - he even called me sir' and Hubert are arrested (for doing nothing) and really nastily tortured (in an uninterrupted scene, which makes it worse). But still these two don't think all cops are bad, indeed are semi-buddies with one, who's also Arabic, but who features in the shocking ending.
The journey makes me thing of films like The Warriors and After Hours (or even Odd Man Out), the phrase 'The World Is Yours' is from some seminal American gangster picture and the discussion about cartoon characters sounds like it could be an homage to Stand By Me!
Really well photographed by Pierre Aïm - that shot where the camera drifts over the banlieue may well have been influenced by Soy Cuba.
Won Best Director at Cannes and Césars for Best Film and Editing (Kossovitz and Scott Stevenson). Kossovitz seems more interested now in acting, having appeared in the hit French series Le Bureau des Légendes across five seasons.
No comments:
Post a Comment