FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL: In France, unlike here, they don’t lock up migrants, but that’s not say that their treatment under the law isn’t still a hot button issue.
The phenomenon of French citizens helping illegal migrants crops up in at least two features in this year’s Alliance Francaise French Film Festival. Hands Up and My Father’s Guests each treat the issue in very different ways. Both have their strengths. While the latter is really a fond satire of French bourgeois liberalism and human weakness, director Romain Goupil’s Hands Up is centered on a group of children and succeeds splendidly in bringing to life their rich world of imagination and play. As a critique of French immigration laws – which it seems also to want to be – it’s less successful.
At its centre is Malena (Linda Doudaeva), the 10-year-old daughter of Chechen migrants without immigration papers. It may help to walk into the film remembering this, because the film doesn’t contain any reference to her background until 22 minutes into its running time, and there were times when I was frankly baffled. It’s hard to know what to make of scenes such as the one where her best friend, a cutely tousle-headed boy called Blaise, turns up at her apartment building bearing a rose and runs away when he sees a man bowing to Mecca. To this viewer – and I suspect many others – Malena looks unambiguously to be white Caucasian. So what is her relationship to this Muslim adult? He turns out to be her Chechen father, but without expository scenes of family life, this information takes some time to filter through.
Establishing the world of the protagonist/s and the world they live in is a crucial first step for virtually any fictional feature, regardless of its style or genre, so it’s tempting to automatically mark this down as an Exposition Fail. It’s quite possible, though, that this initial coyness about Malena’s ethnic identity is deliberate. We learn she’s part of a mixed-race gang who have a secret basement hideout where they pirate video games on DVD. These kids don’t refer to their ethnic identity because they have no awareness of racial difference. The implication is that racism is something that’s learnt from adults.
The petty DVD copying immediately establishes the kids as being in opposition to authority, though in a charmingly innocent way. That opposition becomes more sinister when immigration police raid Malena’s building and take away illegals (or residents without papers or documentation, as the French seem to call them). Parents and teachers at the children’s school start a campaign to try to stop the kids being deported. An incensed liberal and mother of two (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) takes Malena into her home with her parents’ agreement and takes the kids on holiday, where everyone has a magical time. But eventually reality catches up and the kids decide to run away.
Scenes of the youngsters in their hidey-hole; of their playfulness and conspiracies; their hanging out in a waterhole during an idyllic summer and their catching and cooking crabs by the sea – all these are utterly charming and a good reason to see the film. Goupil captures vividly what it’s like to be at this age, where imaginations are huge and the mysterious world of adults is seen through a distorting lens. The presence of Bruni-Tedeschi – one of France’s finest and most compelling female actors – does no harm, either.
