Today, more than 100 years after the publication of Hugo's Les Misérables, the pressing new reality facing French society is the issue of immigration, and related issues such as class divisions, racial confrontations, cultural differences, and religious conflicts. This is a local problem, but also a global problem. Globalization is a global trend, but in recent years, anti-globalization has gradually emerged. In European and American countries, conservative forces are on the rise, social divisions are intensifying, and hatred is also growing. The current social reality calls for literary and artistic works to raise questions and question the status quo.
In 2019, two French films reflecting on immigration, "Synonym" and "Les Miserables", were unveiled at the Berlin Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival respectively. The mediocre Parisian writer Emile in "Synonyms" wants to write a literary masterpiece comparable to "Les Miserables". He uses the experience of Israeli immigrant Joyaf for inspiration. After hypocritical arrogance, Yoav responded with a closed door. The movie "Les Miserables" has more references. Not only does it borrow the name of the original book, but the story also takes place in the suburbs of Paris. The social contradictions and violent resistance displayed echo the revolution in Hugo's original book, and the end of the film directly quotes Hugo's Quotes to sublimate the theme.
Foucault once used the "grey dawn of tolerance" to describe the social changes in European and American countries in the 1960s, and people questioned the various forms of power. In Hugo's original work, love and tolerance overcome prejudice and injustice, and in the closed ending, people get spiritual redemption. Now Raj Lei poses new questions in the form of movies, like a smear of fish maw piercing the dull night sky, delaying the thinking of observing reality. This is the gray dawn, and although the solution to the problem is not yet clear, society will undergo painful and profound adjustment changes.
1. Police group portraits and the ecology of immigrant communities
In the calm before the "storm", the police maintained a fragile and peaceful relationship with the immigrant community outside Paris, and the different races in the community were at peace.
The roles of the three police officers are representative, so as to represent the different attitudes of the mainstream society towards immigration. One is Chris, an arrogant native white man, who is brutal and violent in the process of law enforcement, and says, "We are always right and never apologize." One is a black Vada who was incorporated by power, rarely showing personality and rarely expressing opinions. , but the plot arranged for him to accidentally shoot a black boy, forcing him to linger between a dilemma between career stance and racial identity. The other is Stephen, a moderate out-of-state cop who, as a new police officer, has no prejudice against immigrants and tries to resolve the conflict through polite negotiation, but is eventually forced into a violent confrontation.
In the process of going deep into the community, we can see that chaos and order coexist in the immigrant community, showing a complex social ecology, and the objective record is like a sociological field investigation. Suburbs are the fringe areas in the process of urbanization, a side of the bustling metropolis. Illegal immigrants stay here, and Arabs, Africans and other ethnic groups gather here. This is a place outside the law, a place where the discipline of mainstream society is difficult to penetrate, and criminal activities such as domestic violence, theft, drug trafficking, and prostitution occur frequently. In areas where state power is absent, community power maintains superficial stability. The Muslim Brotherhood, headed by Salah, is a civil religious force; the market managers headed by Mayor "Obama" are tacitly and entrusted by the government. Even women voluntarily set up a "joint pension" to provide interest-free loans to funders, reflecting the vitality of the community economy. The police conduct indirect management of the community through intermediary forces, and the parties maintain a state of cooperation and hostility with the police.
When the police forcibly took Isa, the boy who stole the lion, the state power forcibly intervened in community management, thus breaking the fragile peace.
2. Dramatic display of social conflict
The film is controlled with precise rhythm and uses a Hollywood three-act structure to weave various social conflicts into the plot. The first part shows the living picture of the immigrant community with a gentle rhythm, paving the way for the contradictions; the middle part is fast-paced and exciting. Issa stealing the lion breaks the calm appearance, causing hidden conflicts to erupt one after another. Form a closed structure; the latter paragraph is about 1/3 of the length of the irreconcilable anger that eventually erupts. After a brief lyrical sunset, it quickly entered the plot of the corridor battle, and mass violence broke out. The end came to an abrupt end in the second before the climax, just like the Laocoon statue was frozen at the moment before death, Issa with a Molotov cocktail and Stephen with a gun finally confronted, and Buzz peeped through the door as a witness. An anti-climax with an open-ended ending that leaves narrative suspense and emotional shock, and prompts serious social thinking.
Issa's lion that stole the gypsy was the wire that lit the powder keg. The lion is a symbol of power and majesty, and stealing a lion cub symbolizes the demands of the lower classes for social power. The caged lion in the gypsy circus implies that power should be caged. The angry gypsies used male lions to intimidate Issa, which is intertextual with the previous episode of police brutality that injured Issa.
The contradictions and conflicts in the film are multiple, the main contradictions are: 1. Class contradictions and contradictions between rich and poor. Poverty and crime go hand in hand, and a large number of unemployed people in the community take risks and live in the gray area of society. They are the real bottom proletarians. 2. Ethnic and cultural conflicts. The film does not select the contradiction between the ethnic minorities and the main ethnic group, the Gauls, to start the narrative, but carefully selects the contradiction between the two ethnic minorities, the black Muslims and the Gypsies, which reflects the universality of ethnic contradictions. The different symbolic meanings of the lion in Muslim and Gypsy cultures reflect cultural contradictions. The Gypsies regarded the lion as a circus juggler; and the lion is a symbol of nobility in Muslim culture, which is why Issa stole the lion. 3. The conflict between the police and immigrants. The influx of a large number of illegal immigrants in the community has increased the difficulty of law and order, and the rough law enforcement by the police, represented by Chris, has also intensified the opposition between the police and the people. In the process of chasing Issa, the police confronted black youths in the stadium and the street, and reached an irreconcilable violent confrontation in the final corridor battle. 4. Contradictory positions within the police. After the accidental shooting of Isa, divisions also emerged within the authority. The arrogant and reckless Chris quarreled with the gentle and enlightened Stephen, while the cynic Vada chose to remain silent. 5. The contradiction between the police and the middle forces. Salah protects Issa and the aerial boy Baz, and Chris threatens to root out the Muslim Brotherhood on charges of terrorism. On the surface, the mayor works for the police, but secretly tries to join forces with Salah to threaten the police with aerial video and drive the police out of the community completely. 6. Contradictions between adolescents and adults. The police and mediators control the power of the community. Teenagers are at the bottom of the power. During the corridor battle, the teenagers threw Molotov cocktails to express their anger at the adults.
3. Viewpoint Changes and Documentary Techniques
In this realistic film with political appeal, the subjective truth is used to point to the essential truth. The narrative is mainly based on the perspectives of the policeman Stephen and the aerial photography boy Buzz, and the limited reality from different viewpoints collides with each other to form a multi-dimensional documentary.
Director Raj Leigh, a black immigrant who was born in West Africa and grew up on the outskirts of Paris, introduced the immigrant community from Stephen's stranger's perspective, which should be considered to make it more acceptable to a wide audience who have never known the immigrant community. And Stephen's mild and rational attitude makes the presentation of the realistic picture objective and neutral. The camera enters the immigrant community with the police car, using hand-held camera and medium shot, close-up and other smaller scenes, forming a documentary-style documentary style. But this perspective also poses a problem. The point of view guides the audience's emotional identity. When the police and black teenagers finally clash, the audience needs to turn from the identity of the police to the opposite. Violence and revolution are synonymous.
In addition, the use of panoramic and long-range aerial shots enriches the expressive space of the film; the objective shots are stitched to the subjective viewpoint, so that the image witness has a character standpoint. Aerial photography is used to show slums, and it is also used in "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Why Home". Aerial photography takes a bird's-eye view of human existence and human suffering from the perspective of God, which has the characteristics of objectivity and alienation. The aerial footage of the film is like a witness to the incident, which appears when the Gypsies break into the black settlement, and when the police brutally law enforcement shoots and wounds Issa. The aerial footage in the first two films is an unpersonal viewpoint. In this film, the aerial footage is stitched to the viewpoint of Buzz, a black boy who controls the aerial camera, which also represents the director’s own position: use images to witness the truth and speak out for the immigrant group. And aerial photography is also involved in the narrative. The narrative momentum has shifted from catching the lion thief to preventing the leakage of aerial video, involving all forces in the conflict.
In the latter part of the film, it jumps from the subjective point of view to the third-person point of view. In the corridor battle, a similar number of shots were given to the police, black teenagers, and intermediaries, trying to describe the riot in a neutral manner. However, the multiple jumps of viewpoints make the originally tense narrative break into a modern sense, which is also considered a beautiful jade.
4. The Ghost of Revolution and the Rebellion of Youth
The scene where the whole country celebrates the victory of the French team at the beginning and the reality of the social tearing at the end are embarrassing. The mainstream French values of "liberty, equality and fraternity" have not been able to integrate different groups in society, and the unity of consciousness is better than building Babel. Towers are even harder. As the saying goes, "Those who know the house and leaks are in the sky, and those who know the government and losers are in the grass." It is necessary to pay attention to the survival of the bottom society and listen to the demands of the marginalized.
Raj Leigh's first feature film looks so edgy and unabashedly political, it seems to be a variation on left-wing cinema, groundbreaking and revolutionary, mixed with new issues of immigration. The May storm is gone, and the discourse about the revolution has gradually become unfamiliar. French films are often regarded as petty-bourgeois sentiments, and French romance has become synonymous with spring flowers and snowy moon. Have you ever imagined that just over 50 years ago, French films were so avant-garde in terms of political expression that Godard and other filmmakers took to the streets with cameras to record historical fragments of those "red when the revolution was spreading". The so-called romance is not tender, but also contains ideals, restlessness, revolution, violence and other factors. The fact of the revolution is gone, and the revolution has become a ghost in Europe, and the memory and imagination of the revolution are sometimes called back to the world. The sound of the explosion of the Molotov cocktail in the corridor battle is the cry of the bottom people, shattering the arrogance and prejudice of the mainstream society.
Youth was once a poetic time in the memory of adults, but in this film, teenagers regained the right to interpret youth: youth is a revolution against all inequality. The teenagers in the immigrant community made people see the Sorbonne students on the streets of Paris in 1968 in a trance. In the adult world that pays attention to the game of interests, young people appear as different and pioneering images, carrying political and cultural radical demands. The cramped corridor has become a battlefield, like a deformation of the barricade battle in the past. Therefore, in the film, the teenagers led by Issa not only resisted the police, but also resisted the middle forces within the community.
However, violence is a catharsis of demands, and whether it contributes to social progress is debatable. In the end credits, Hugo's famous saying "There are no bad crops in the world, and there are no bad people, only bad farmers" sublimates the theme. But blaming the problem only on the police makes the film look like it's on the verge of writing, while the writing is a little bit floating. The immigration issue is not just as simple as driving away the police. It is a multi-product of social, historical, political and economic issues. It involves multiple international facts such as geopolitics, hegemonism, colonial history, and the European debt crisis. But the more real question is whether violence is constructive and whether hatred helps solve the problem. The author believes that the original intention of the film is not to promote atrocities and tear society apart, but to stop all kinds of explicit and implicit violence against people at the bottom. As Sartre wrote in the preface to Fanon's "The Sufferers of the World": "No tenderness will erase these marks of violence, only violence will destroy them." Understanding and tolerance have become the consensus of all groups in society, and perhaps we can discuss how to solve problems in a more peaceful context.
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