Les Indésirables (2023)
Original title: Bâtiment 5
Directed by Ladj Ly
The camera swoops down over the Parisian banlieue, much like the opening scene of Psycho in Phoenix, Arizona. There, Hitchcock’s masterpiece transitioned from the outside to a room where a couple had just made love. Here, we enter a cramped, dark space where death is in the air—a woman, the elderly grandmother of an African immigrant family, has just passed away, and the community gathers to mourn. The oppressive surroundings make it difficult even to carry the coffin out. “How can one live and die in a place like this?” someone asks, echoing the central question throughout the film.
Five years after his explosive debut with Les Misérables, French-Malian director Ladj Ly returns to the banlieue’s hellish environment to again explore the difficulties, conflicts, and contradictions of multicultural coexistence. However, unlike his debut, which clearly drew from Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), this film leans more towards politically charged cinema akin to the works of Robert Guédiguian or Ken Loach, with a nod to Francesco Rosi’s timeless Le mani sulla città.
Set in the Montefermeil neighborhood, renamed Montvilliers, the story revolves around the demolition of a public housing building, Batiment 5 (as per the original French title), for a real estate scheme. The collapse’s smoke accidentally kills the current mayor, leading to the appointment of an inexperienced, ambitious pediatrician who naively believes he can bring order to the neighborhood with force: forced evacuations, evictions, raids, and a curfew for minors after 8 PM. Anger erupts.
Ladj Ly masterfully captures the conflicts, not just between different ethnic groups, but also within them. The most intriguing aspect is the contrast between the young Haby (Anta Diaw), who sees herself as a “modern Frenchwoman” and chooses politics to assert her rights, and her friend who, driven by anger, turns to violence as a means of struggle. Equally powerful is the portrayal of the relationship between the reactionary mayor and his wife, who accuses him of playing cowboy and endangering their family with his actions. The camera often mirrors the panic, anxiety, rage, and disillusionment of the characters. In the desecrated Christmas scene, it manages to convey an almost physical sense of discomfort and resentment rooted in deep-seated issues. While cinema may not heal these wounds, Ladj Ly’s passionate storytelling makes them visible, contributing to a greater awareness of the world we live in.
* * *
by Massimo Lastrucci
In 2019, Ladj Ly, born in 1978 to parents from Mali and raised in Montfermeil, near Paris, directed one of the most impactful and memorable films of the year after a series of shorts and documentaries. Les Misérables, a raw depiction of the ongoing and unofficially declared war between immigrant suburbs and the police, earned the Jury Prize at Cannes.
In 2024, he remains deeply connected to his creative milieu and directs Les Indésirables (titled Bâtiment 5 in the original, named after the building where the filmmaker grew up, but renamed for obvious reasons of “resemblance”).
Set in Montvillers, a fictional but highly believable Parisian suburb, the film depicts a simmering conflict between institutions (the mayor and the police) and the tenants of a massive, dilapidated building—a community of the marginalized and unwelcomed who struggle daily to survive (“everyone here is a foreigner; the French don’t live here”). The newly appointed mayor, Pierre Forges, a pediatrician who took over after his predecessor suffered a heart attack while overseeing the demolition of a large building, aims to revitalize the neighborhood through legal measures (and a harsh approach). He lacks experience (“do you know what it means to be the mayor of a place like this?” warns his “very black and very large” deputy, who is practical and familiar with the environment) but grows increasingly confident, eventually resorting to less clean tactics. Opposing him is Haby, an intern at the town hall and a passionate volunteer at an independent tenant assistance center, who resists the easy path of vandalism and violence.
While his previous film was more shocking in its feverish realism, this gut-punch of a movie—though not devoid of hope—alternates between close-up shots of the characters (more accurately, with them) and inspired, sharp wide-angle shots (spectacular are the aerial views) that reveal the significant artistic vision of the director, now working with a more substantial budget. As is typical of more orthodox dramas, the narrative steadily builds to a frenetic and potentially tragic climax, drawing empathetically on our sense of indignation.
Ladj Ly wields a rich palette of narrative technique (see the almost classical transition scenes, with music accompanying the sequences in montage), expressiveness, and motivation. He does not stray from the environment in which he grew up, aiming to awaken the consciousness of a world that is anesthetized and annoyed by the voices of another society, one that is at times passive and at times embittered (“how can one live and die in a place like this?”).
Among the actors, Anta Diaw (virtually a newcomer) delivers a highly engaged performance as the protagonist, while familiar faces such as Alexis Manenti (who also appeared in Les Misérables and the thematically related Athena by Romain Gavras) and Jeanne Balibar (daughter of philosopher Étienne and a central figure in contemporary French cinema, from Assayas’ Clean (2004) to Giannoli’s Lost Illusions, 2021) represent the “white” characters.
Cineforum, July 5, 2024
