Cinema and the Republic: Filming on the Margins in Contemporary France by Jonathan Ervine (review)

Much was made of the banlieue film in work on French cinema in the early 2000s. The sensationalist La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) attracted considerable attention from politicians, notably Jacques Chirac in his presidential campaign of 1995, and from film scholars, who saw it as a symptom of Chirac’s theme of fracture sociale. Film scholars have shifted their focus in recent years, partly because of a growing interest in the films of Maghrebi directors in postcolonial contexts, and partly because of a resurgence of interest in political cinema as exemplified by Martin O’Shaughnessy’s The New Face of Political Cinema (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), in which the Dardenne brothers’ films are as important as any broad category such as banlieue cinema. Jonathan Ervine’s book frequently references O’Shaughnessy’s work (as well as Mireille Rosello’s essential study, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford University Press, 2001)), and is a useful addition to it. Ervine focuses on fiction and non-fiction films since 1995 that deal with the plight of immigrants and banlieusards. Feature films and documentaries are taken as more or less equivalent in terms of what they can tell us about the nature of contemporary France. The mixture of genres, however, sometimes leads to strange bedfellows, such as in Chapter 2, which analyses Samir Abdallah’s La Ballade des sans-papiers (1997) alongside Michael Haneke’s Code inconnu (2000). Understandably, there is little work here on formal and aesthetic issues, such as the nature of documentary filmmaking. Among the handful of fiction films, apart from Code inconnu, we find, predictably, La Haine and Ma 6-T va crack-er (Jean-François Richet, 1997), but, less predictably, films that others have explored in some detail from very different perspectives, such as L’Esquive (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2004) and Bled Number One (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2006). The majority of the films discussed are documentaries, many of them relatively unknown (such as On n’est pas des marques de vélos (Jean-Pierre Thorn, 2002)), which makes this book a valuable resource. After the introductory first chapter, four major chapters each deal with a key theme. Chapter 2 rightly foregrounds one of the significant issues of the mid-1990s, the sans-papiers. Chapter 3 focuses on films that defend foreign nationals subject to the double peine. Chapter 4 is concerned with representations of the banlieues. The final chapter, which in many ways is the most interesting, shows how certain films shy away from the sensational in their representations of ordinary life in the banlieues. Ervine references the twists and turns of government policy, such as the Loi Pasqua, which led to the criminalization of hardworking individuals; one particularly striking phrase intentionally echoes Simone de Beauvoir, suggesting that ‘on ne naît pas sans-papiers, on le devient’ (p. 37). Underpinning the whole book is the simple question: what is the relevance of republicanism in an increasingly multicultural society? Ervine points out that the reality of daily life in France has less to do with government rhetoric about republican values and national identity than with participation and an acceptance of hybridity.