«There are no weeds or bad men; there are only bad cultivators ». The phrase appears in the frontispiece of Les Misérables and on it (or against it) director Ladj Ly composes a film that, in reality, is just anger. And few affections (or disaffections) as confusing as that "sad passion" Spinoza said. Aristotle saw in her the possibility of pleasure that always accompanies the hope of revenge. On the one hand, it is not difficult to locate in it the nobility of rebellion against the offenses and injustices endured; but, on the other, anger carries with it the necessary loss of both autonomy and judgment. Let's say that all the characters in the film of the debutante French filmmaker of Malian origin live trapped in the contradiction of knowing with a single privilege: the right to despair.
The film, which opens Friday after winning the Jury Prize in Cannes and will represent France at the Oscars , starts with a celebration. In the center of Paris, in the same place where shortly after the yellow vests will make the foundations of the Republic show their cracks, a group of teenagers let themselves be dragged by the fever. France is proclaimed champion of the world of football and, if only for a moment, everything makes sense. It's the last time you hear someone sing in the movie. The camera vibrates as documentaries are only able to do when they lose their balance. That's what it is about, losing your foot in the fury of a mass of happy and furious people. The scene marks the temperature of everything that will come after that, it has already been said, is just anger.
The wretched follows a group of policemen in a suburb neighborhood in Paris. This is the same place where Victor Hugo made Jean Valjean take refuge and meet Cosette. And it looks too much like the slum where two young people aged 15 and 17 died electrocuted when they tried to flee from the agents who were chasing them in 2005 . That unleashed fury throughout Paris. And the anger. The banlieu is called Montfermeil and the misery of centuries ago remains in the same place, at the same time and arranged in the same way. The relevant thing is that the miserable of then share locality, wounds and, obviously, misery with those of now. Misery, time does not matter, is always the same. In between, the local mafias, the incipient Islamic fundamentalism, the young people of the street, the desperation, the noise, the fury and even the euphoria. Everything is there. “The inequality is the same and the really sad thing is that nothing has changed since 2005 and since the whole world took to the streets to the yellow vests. No one has done anything, the situation is the same. And anger too, ”says Ladj Ly.
The director who understands his work as a necessary fight against the phrases made, the clichés and the quick images on the news. «Not everything is negative in the suburbs. There is life, young people wanting to do things and with incredible energy. However, that is never seen. Do not care. It is part of the conflict to show that there is only conflict. I myself have set up a film school for the kids and I still, nevertheless, live there with my family, ” he likes to comment as a declaration of principles. The film was born after a long process that, in truth, has taken his entire life. Originally, it was a highly awarded short film. Before, the director worked camera in hand embedded in a police unit. And much further back, since he was born, his neighborhood, it has already been said, is the one that serves as the stage. Not only does he know what he is talking about, but he has been talking about it every day of his 37 years of life.
"The mistake," he says, " is to believe that the police are on one side and the others on the other. The police do not live in the neighborhood, but work there for eight to ten hours a day . They are part of the same problem. They arrive at a place where social problems are enormous and they are the only representatives of a State that has long since abandoned its obligations, which does not exist ». And that is where, in effect, the miserable ones are placed: next to everyone and at the right distance from each of the protagonists. All guilty for the simple reason that they are innocent, in the most radical of the senses. All poisoned by, again, an anger that can.
The director's strategy is to match the fever of his characters with that of the same camera. From the first to the last frame, the tape responds to a trance choreography as magnetic as it is dangerously entertaining. Rarely the use of the ubiquitous drone in current cinematography is so justified. The director wants to play with that feeling very close to the feeling of guilt that tries to enjoy with the most desolate of the scenarios. And it is there, in that fracture, where all the bile is cast, all the corrosive power of a film that makes the artifice of a genre film its own without complexes.
Ly likes to remember that he dedicated himself to the cinema after watching The Hate, the 1995 film by Mathieu Kassovitz where everything was already guessed: dissatisfaction, anger, disaffection ... That and the outbreak of Islamic fundamentalism. That and the protests that have set Paris on fire do nothing. «Yellow vests have always been there, in the suburbs, for decades. Now they have become visible, but it is a mistake to believe that things can change by going out to make the revolution once a week. The revolution must be done every day by changing things, ”he says. And that is what he tries to do with a group of friends organized in the collective that attends to the name of Kourtajmé. "We come from different social environments and we are moved by the need to make movies, to tell things," he insists.
And that need is appreciated both in the film itself and in its reverse that is guessed. The wretched grows on the back. Each of its brightest moments throbs in the meticulous reconstruction of a universe that, left by the hand of God, imposes its own rules, its laws, outside the glorious Republic, light years away from the country that gets excited with football. The members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the gypsies of a traveling circus, the police and the infinity of teenage bands coexist in the same impossible balance in which the film advances. Everything about to always jump through the air. Between anger and anger.
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