Text｜Twelve Chenzi
During the 2019 Cannes Film Festival
First public account: Deepfocus Deepfocus (Original title: Please return the stolen Palme d'Or!)
In 1989, Spike Lee was shortlisted for the main competition of the 42nd Cannes Film Festival with "Do What You Should", and 30 years later established its classic status as a black film and a racial film. In 2019, the new film "Les Miserables" by the black French director Rad Li will undoubtedly grab a dazzling position for this type of film at the Cannes Film Festival.
"Les Miserables" is the director's feature debut, based on his 2016 Caesars Award-nominated short film of the same name. The story follows a dispute between Stéphane, a newcomer from Cherbourg, and two experienced policemen who mediate a gang in the neighborhood, only to become even more violent when an act of police violence is accidentally recorded by a drone during the mediation process. Before getting the chance to make his feature-length debut, La Deli was already an experienced video maker, and his semi-documentary, semi-fictional films had already attracted critical attention.
The story of the movie "Les Miserables" takes place in Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris where the director grew up in the 93rd province, which is also the most notorious and worst-police area in Paris with mixed races; however, on the other hand, there is a history of architecture here. The iconic Saint-Denis Cathedral is home to the University of Paris VIII, which is well-known in film studies and psychoanalysis. It is also here that Victor Hugo wrote his famous Les Misérables.
Immigrant Identity
What "Les Miserables" expresses is not the too empty and idealized concept of racial integration, nor does Rad Leigh criticize his own ethnic group like Spike Lee, but once again use his own good record-fiction The technique describes the inevitable immigration problem for most French and even Europeans (this is a familiar technique in his previous online work "go fast connexion".) Many people will be surprised at the color of the streets when they arrive in Paris. There are so many people that they think that Paris is no longer Paris. But to really discuss the racial topic of this film, we must first try to distinguish between immigrant psychology and social psychology.
In the first act of the film's opening, all the French crowded into the streets to celebrate the Azzurri's victory in the World Cup. Football has briefly brought people of color together at the moment, or simply found a common thread. But even at the moment of celebration, there is little contact between the different communities, only people from the same race come together. It's hard to imagine how a community of people of all colors, languages, and cultures can stay afloat. The mainstream view of social movement research in the West comes from cultural identity. This concept, which is strongly different from the nation-state, is a cultural construction at the level of modernity. Of course, identification itself is subjective, the positioning of self-consciousness. But is this identity really recognized by traditional European whites, or the immigrant's doubts about their own identity already imply the failure of identity.
Therefore, the film cleverly bypasses the already vulgar and irreconcilable contradiction between black and white confrontation, and turns to discuss the conflict between communities. The reason why the community is used instead of the group is because the group portraits in the film can be divided from different angles (this is actually contrary to the discussion of the group in "Do what's right".) - Anti-crime police trio, High school students, underworld, children, Muslim brothers... This division makes the boundaries of identification and classification between people abolished, but at the same time makes the contradictions more complicated and difficult to resolve.
Perhaps it is precisely because of the peacefulness of the first half of the film that the overall outbreak of potential contradictions at the end is highlighted. Ran Dian is already crawling, just waiting for the lead that ignites it. The fundamental reason for the intensification of contradictions is that identity is emphasized by special events at some special moments.
truth without reflection
In 2015, the social film "Dupin the Wandering", which depicts racial fighting among minorities in the suburbs of Paris, won the Palme d'Or, but then the film caused a fierce attack by the magazine Cahier de la Cinéma. They even published a special issue with the theme of "Empty French Films" criticizing the fake political and social films represented by "The Wandering Dupin". Such films use social issues to gain political attention of the film festival, but in reality they are only the upper middle class. Imagination of clichés at the bottom of society. Just an opportunistic political gesture for festival nominations and awards.
The biggest problem with this type of film is that it lacks authenticity. Because the director Audia himself, including many white Parisians, has no experience of living in the suburbs of Paris. The stories he constructs all come from his own class imagination. In contrast, the stories of immigrants in the third world are only attractive foreigners - like the French bourgeois in the movie "Synonyms" who listened to the story of the male lead. Ladd uses his own memories and experiences to refute Odia, the suburbs of Paris are not the only drugs and violence their old white men imagined.
In order to highlight the different positions of the three police officers, the film deliberately makes them have an overly facial image. The first is to change the cop who shot the boy in the short film from the new Pento to a black cop, so that Pento becomes a dull good guy. Chris represents racist white supremacists, Gwada is a mediator with black people talking about exotic hospitals. The film uses the conflict between the three policemen as the turning point of the event, but this imbalance makes the middle appear very rigid, and this transitional scene where the three go home and think calmly also loses its persuasiveness.
At the same time, in order to retain the basic framework of changing from short to long, the film must retain the drone part of the core of the short film. But the problem is that the peeping function undertaken by the drone is broken by the presence of a group of children. Since everyone is an eyewitness, there is no need to worry about the documentary function of the drone footage being leaked. Suffice it to say that this change resulted in Drone Boy becoming a complete witness to the beginning and end of the event, both times watching the event through other mediums.
Once Radley's strong setting is accepted, it's an easy movie to get into. And the persuasive power that is unique to the documentary makes it easy to bring viewers in. Radley, who was born in a documentary, is good at capturing the environment and emergencies. In the first half of the film, a large amount of space is used to describe the daily life of the neighborhood, and the interaction between different communities is enriched. But the problem with this film is the slightly deliberately strong setting, especially the compromise that had to be made in order to retain the meta-concept after changing from a short to a feature film.
At the core of Les Misérables is "redemption," but what about the community of color? The title is "Les Miserables," but the only connection to Hugo is because it was in this neighborhood that the novel was born. Clearly, the director's interviews and citations to Hugo's original text demonstrate his lack of interest in ethnic reflection. Although it possesses the tension of violent conflict and the control over the scheduling of struggles in "Do What You Should", it loses the extension of the critical level due to the overly descriptive arrangement. Or perhaps this deprivation of reflection is one of the answers to why violence occurs so frequently here.
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