01/09/2011

Presented out of competition at the 68th Venice International Film Festival, La Désintégration [+see also:
trailer
film profile] looks once again at the ghettoisation of French youngsters who, coming from an immigrant background, have inherited the discrimination that comes with it, as well as a foreign name and genetic inheritance. This is a subject which fascinates the director-screenwriter Philippe Faucon who has already focused on this issue in several films (Samia, Being Seventeen, The Betrayal [+see also:
trailer
film profile]).

In the Lille suburbs, three Moroccan brothers are faced with the difficult integration within a society that wasn’t designed for them. While one of them plans to marry a young French woman, the two others experience setbacks which bring them closer to Djamel, a charismatic defender of the Koran who slyly preaches a return to the paths of fundamentalist Islam. Manipulative Djamel exploits the weaknesses of his prey in order to steer them towards armed terrorism, which according to him is the only means of defence against a society which refuses to make room for them and has preferred to distance itself from God...

In La Désintégration, Faucon has set out to tell a fictional story tackling the thorny but above all hackneyed subject of terrorism without lapsing into over-simplistic Manicheism. The intention is laudable, but sometimes struggles to materialise on screen. The director imagines the frame as an open window on the unease surrounding North African integration in present-day France. Open, because there is no filter, the image jumps out at us from a raw camera, as if the slightest aesthetic aspect would have betrayed the authenticity by puncturing its gravity. Between the difficulty in finding a job, racism and the stigmatisation of the other, the story moves quickly from the cause to the effect, namely disintegration, in the literal and figurative sense to point out just one metaphor among others in the film. “He who imitates a people belongs to them”, preaches Djamel in order to transform the anger of his flock towards society into a duty for marginalisation. This type of message gives food for thought.

In order not to stigmatise religion, but only the distortion of it, the director regularly goes back to the doctrine of the mother, a first-generation immigrant, who is constantly redefining her good practice of the Koran in contrast with the brainwashing that two of her sons are undergoing. For her, it’s a matter of talking about Islam without hatred, but nevertheless respecting its precepts. She hasn’t started the process of disintegration affecting her children. She is in the middle of the scale, stationary. At the top, her daughter considers herself as French, integrated to the point of pretending not to understand her parents’ language. “You have to learn to understand”, says her exasperated but realistic mother. Lower down the family, another son has started the process of upward integration by getting engaged to a French girl. But elsewhere, it’s a rapid fall and the process is no less rapid when the fateful moment of Jihadist recruitment arrives.

“Only the impious are afraid of death because if they lose their life, they lose everything.” Is that the type of speech which led to the tragedy of September 11, 2001? Faucon seems to think so when he tells the story of a group of martyrs in his own version of the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center, replaced here by the NATO headquarters in Brussels. Two suicide-bomber planes, two booby-trapped cars and a third one which ends in a failed attempt. There too it is too simple to deny the obvious comparison...

(Translated from French)