FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL: Since Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), a major hit at home that ignited a mainstream political debate, an increasing number of French filmmakers have located films in les banlieues – the soulless, unromantic modern suburbs ringing Paris’s romantically historic centre. The films are often the product of directors who have grown up in the suburbs, especially the sons and daughters of migrants. Usually they don’t get commercial release in Australia – even La Haine was considered a flop in this country – but they do get onto festival programs.
Turk’s Head has already been briefly available for screening here as part of a new annual online festival, My French Film Festival, organised by French cinema’s international promotion body, Unifrance, where it was one of 10 features in official competition. But its screenings as part of the Alliance Francaise event are the first chance for Australians to see it on the cinema screen.
This edgy, suburban crime and social issues drama marks the directorial debut for actor Pascal Elbé and was inspired by true-life events in Marseilles. It may or may not be set in Paris (to a non-French viewer, this is not entirely clear) but it clearly fits into the recent banlieue film tradition.
In a literally explosive start, we’re thrown into the middle of a riot on a high rise estate. Youths are hurling abuse and missiles as police try to arrest a local woman. During the fracas, a young member of a gang of youths hurls a petrol bomb from the roof of a tower block. It explodes just outside a car that quickly catches fire. Watching, the boy immediately realises the enormity of what he’s done, dashes down several flights of stairs and pulls its driver clear of the vehicle shortly before its petrol tank explodes.
The youth is Bora (Samir Makhlouf), a 14-year-old kid of Turkish background who lives with his mother. What happens next provides the film’s ironic spine. Bora is quickly and very publicly proclaimed a hero, with politicians doing their best to celebrate his action for their own cynical reasons. Bora resists. The doctor (played by Elbé) is in a coma in hospital and the teen knows he’s the one to blame.
Meanwhile, the doctor’s brother (Roschdy Zem) is a cop who takes of charge of the investigation to find out who threw the Molotov cocktail. For him, it’s not just a professional mater. It’s a personal mission of revenge excusing any brutality he commits along the way.
As the above synopsis doubtless already makes evident, dramatic convenience and unlikely coincidence are taken just a bit too far in Turk’s Head. It’s a shame because in most other respects this is a gutsy, well acted and passionate drama that is timeless in its sense of tragedy.
While the main plotting is lucid, the film has a subplot I struggled to make sense of at all – frustrating, because it’s tied into the main plot at the film’s denouement in a way that it is impossible to ignore. But flaws aside, the film usefully interrogates the common notion of heroism and our tendency to divide our dramatic understanding into simplistic categories of good and bad.
