14/09/2022 - Control of the banlieue and its traffic networks, the weight of the past, present conflicts and dreams of faraway futures all collide with a cosmic phenomenon in Cédric Ido’s original film

"The elders understood. There are rules here now. Either you adapt, or you disappear", "We see everything here, nothing escapes us." In terms of films about the Paris banlieue, French cinema has already explored many avenues, from La Haine to Les Misérables [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ladj Ly
film profile] as well as the recent Athena [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Romain Gavras
film profile], to cite just a few examples from a genre that oscillates between social realism and thriller, often against the background of drug trafficking or the desire to get out by all means necessary of a milieu where apartment blocks often look like prisons. But since Gagarin [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Tr…
film profile] (2020), a new variant has emerged, adding a streak of fantasy to what is usually a highly realistic and codified universe. Such is the gamble attempted by Cédric Ido’s The Gravity, unveiled in the Platform competition of the 47th Toronto International Film Festival.

Side A: Christophe (Jean-Baptiste Anoumon) is back after spending three years in prison. The neighbourhood is now controlled by a group of young men who called themselves the Ronin (samouraï without masters), who deal a synthetic drug in a very organised manner (no weapons, no phones, social activities to help the locals, but still the usual techniques of intimidation against potential competitors). In that picture, the revenant, who dreams only of money and revenge (he was snitched on to the police), crosses paths with figures from a bygone era: brothers Daniel (Max Gomis) and Joshua (Steve Tientcheu). The former, a top-level athlete, is about to leave France for Canada with Sabrina (Hafsia Herzi) and their daughter Naya. But he does not dare tell Joshua, wheelchair-bound since a fall in his youth (during which died Christophe’s brother – a striking opening scene) and a very strong character who forced Daniel to help him everyday with his drug trafficking activities. Add to the mix the talkative Jović (Olivier Rosemberg), who makes his way between the former and the current bosses of the neighbourhood, and four people charged with keeping the drug money hidden in apartments, and you have the recipe for a potential explosion of violence, bringing together grudges from the past and projections into the future…

Side B: an obsession for the media, an imminent and unique astronomical phenomenon is on the horizon, as the eight planets of our solar system are coming into alignment. The sky is turning redder and redder, and no one really knows what impact this perfect alignment will have on terrestrial life, particularly on gravity, one of the four fundamental interactions of the universe, the human verticality which keeps us on the Earth and dictates the fall of objects. The allegory of this pre-apocalyptic atmosphere soon begins to make sense at the heart of the intense disputes in the neighbourhood…  

Cédric Ido’s second feature film after Château [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (2017), The Gravity makes an interesting mix of these two main ingredients. Life in the banlieue, where everyone surveils each other and conspired in the apartment lobbies, the difficulty to pull out of this small world all tied up in loyalty and betrayals, the underground violence (a Dantean fight breaks out), collide in a credible and spectacularly rendered science-fiction dimension (a special mention goes to the score composed by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine) in a very promising film from a talent that could still be perfected.

Produced by Une Fille Productions and co-produced by Trésor Cinéma, The Gravity is sold internationally by Kinology.

(Translated from French)