If you are seeking films or texts that offer alternate understandings of metropolitan France—whether to enliven your summer or add to a fall syllabus—consider the works reviewed here. Each takes a novel approach to challenges that weigh on modern France—environmental, social, and racial—and manage to find some space for hope.
Sabrina Bouarour focuses on the bande dessinée and film Les algues vertes, both of which address the cover-up of environmental hazards in Brittany. The BD examines the commercial, environmental, and political contexts that permitted toxic green algae to blanket the Breton coast for decades, killing animals and at least three people, until investigative journalist Inès Léraud exposed the scandal in 2016. If the BD’s perspective is broad and largely neutral, the fiction film that grew from it offers a more personalized account by focusing on the efforts of the journalist Léraud, her partner, Judith, and a few Breton locals to publicize this dangerous pollution. The film, Bouarour concludes, does not simply join a select body of movies that celebrate whistle-blowers but innovates on the genre by adopting an eco-feminist perspective.
Ashley Harris introduces readers to a singular vision of the Paris banlieues elaborated by director Alice Diop in her documentary, Nous. Unlike most “banlieue films,” Nous sidesteps the genre’s clichés of poor, criminalized, and almost exclusively Black or Brown suburbs to depict pedestrian routines that illuminate many kinds of experience and a range of classes, ethnicities, and occupations. Everywhere she looks, Diop finds unexpected points of connection between her subjects but she does not naively deny the presence of hierarchy or discrimination. Her film proceeds slowly, as Harris acknowledges, but richly rewards the patient viewer by overturning tired stereotypes about race and difference in the Paris banlieues.
Hugo Bujon’s review of Pour la France attends to that film’s reformulation of military experience and the formerly colonized. Rather than taking the usual route of focusing on the bloody experience of warfare, Pour la France addresses French military institutions’ promise of national integration by detailing a family’s fight to obtain burial with military honors for a young man killed during a hazing incident at the military school of Saint-Cyr. Like Les algues vertes, Pour la France embeds its broad arguments about French politics and culture in a narrative organized around specific characters. However, in so doing, Bujon concludes, the film too often obscures the social structures and historical practices that would give its account greater analytic power.
Reviews
Les algues vertes : de la BD documentaire au film de fiction, portrait d’une lanceuse d’alerte écoféministe by Sabrina Bouarour, University of London Institute in Paris
Who are we? New portraits of the banlieues parisiennes in Nous by Alice Diop by Ashley Harris, Trinity College Dublin
En deuil pour la nation : Pour la France de Rachid Hami by Hugo Bujon, Lehman College-CUNY