‘The Undesirables’: direct cinema for the people in a France that is collapsing | Culture

In the second sequence of The undesirables, even in the first minutes of the film, the mayor of an unspecified French city suffers a heart attack during a public event: the controlled explosion of a ruinous mastodon building, full of families from immigration. Dressed in a band across his chest with the country’s flag, the public office is on the verge of death, and a doctor cuts the insignia with scissors to relieve the pressure and be able to offer the care he needs. The tricolor is broken in half in a paradigmatic detail shot. It is no longer a simple flag on a man’s chest: it is France itself, divided in two, like so many other nations in the world. And that dying man is exhausting greatness (the illustrious and vaunted grandeur) of a country that is collapsing. Like the building of controlled destruction, which also gets out of control, and ends up staining those present with dust. France is a rubble.

Ladj Ly, Frenchman of Malian origin, director of the successful The Miserables (2019), begins in a symbolic way, but the rest of his new film is very direct. Shortly after, the problems begin to be verbalized. The real estate shenanigans of the deceased leader, which affect the deputy mayor, and which end up bringing to the council a second-in-command who has barely been a councilor for three years. “He has clean hands,” say those at the top of a political party that is also not specified, but could well be Macronism. An idealistic pediatrician who, like the Broderick Crawford of pride The politician (Robert Rossen, 1949), represents the honest and brave man who is going to get dirty with every puddle.

The second aspect of The undesirables It stars a young social worker at the town hall, in charge of the housing section, and who, faced with the progressive harshness of the new mayor, exposed by Ly with a perhaps too abrupt turn, will end up taking an important step towards active politics. Thus, the once idealistic president begins to talk in his responses to journalists about “selective immigration,” and the leaders of the party, those who never get involved in the street, severely criticized by Ly, call him out for seeming “ a reactionary.”

With a more classic staging than that of The Miserables, based on the agility and almost the rudeness of the camera on her shoulder, Ly is direct in her texts and in her situations. She does not make films for bourgeois European left-wing film buffs. She makes films so that she is understood the first time. “We cannot accommodate all the poor in the world. “We have the highest concentration of foreigners and the highest crime rate,” she says in the film. And she doesn’t say it from a so-called pure-bred Frenchman. The former deputy mayor, black, of African origin, raised in the suburbs, says it in terms that could also be those of Jordan Bardella, the new friendly face of National Rally, Marine Le Pen’s party, recent winner in the European elections, aspiring to become prime minister after the next legislative elections, of Italian origin, and also raised in the multicultural suburbs.

TO The undesirables It lacks finesse. The confrontation between trying to live and work with what you can and where you can, and compliance with rules in a first world country, in addition to the responses given to these divergences, are exposed too thickly. However, at the same time, it approaches problems of obvious significance with judgment and without subterfuge. Ly makes films for the people. And sometimes she is able to sum it up well with a single sentence. Like when they ask the social worker of Malian origin who gets into politics how she would define herself, and she simply answers: “Like a Frenchwoman today.” And that “today” should be emphasized.

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