I’m not sure why this 1997 film features in the 2020 My French Film Festival. It’s directed and part written by Jean-François Richet, a singular figure with an unusual career trajectory. The strange title makes use of the extended verlan (slang) spoken in les banlieues – the high-rise blocks built on the outskirts of Paris which by the late 1990s mainly housed the families of Maghrebis, Caribbeans and West Africans alongside white working-class families. ‘6T’ refers to the cités, the individual groups of high rises separated by open spaces. The overall title then refers to ‘my neighbourhood is cracking up’. The use of ‘crack’ may refer to the drug cultute as well as the sense of conflict. The film must in France have been compared with La haine (1995) which had caused such a stir a couple of years earlier. I’ll try to make some comments on the comparison later on.
Richet made an earlier film Inner City (1995) with a similar setting. It received praise as a first feature and seems to have been part self-financed. Ma 6T va crack-er by contrast had some major backing by French producers and funders such as Canal+ and was theatrically distributed by BAC. Richet later directed American films starting with a re-make of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) before the major France-Canada production of the two Mesrine films in 2008, featuring Vincent Cassel and an all-star cast. I can’t find much about Richet online but his is an intriguing story in outline.
Ma 6T va crack-er was co-written with Richet’s younger cousin, Arco Descat C. who had also appeared in Inner City. The film focuses on the youth of a particular cité, both those still at school and the unemployed older youths in their early 20s. It begins with an incident in the local high school followed by various clashes with the police and and other groups of youths. For various reasons, these scenes are both similar to and very different from those in La haine. Firstly where Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine focuses on three young men in their early 20s, Richet offers a much larger group of characters (and it becomes quite difficult to disentangle the relationships between them). Kassovitz decided to present his film in black and white (though it was shot in colour) and to use a highly stylised approach to cinematography and mise en scène. Richet’s film uses a more direct approach often with a hand-held camera and scenes seem much looser, leading some commentators to refer to an almost documentary style. There are also major differences in ideas about representations. Kassovitz creates a male narrative in which female characters are marginal at best. Richet doesn’t necessarily have more female characters but they ‘speak’ more assertively. The film opens with a credit sequence featuring Virginie Ledoyen (then something of a young star in French film and TV) dancing and posing with pistols against a backdrop of TV images of protest in les cités. She again appears later, non-diegetically ‘imposed’ over scenes of gang violence and protest. Later in the film one of the older youths approaches a young woman who he remembers from school. He asks her for a date and she gives him a lecture about the fact that she is tired after a hard day’s work whereas he does nothing all day. The message is clear. On the other hand, Richet’s male youths are more misogynistic in the ways in which they describe young women than the three young men in La haine.
The main ‘message’ of Richet’s film that has been picked out by the limited number of commentators online is its seeming sense of a political consciousness. During their long discussions, some gang members stress the need to work collectively and to align themselves with workers who have the strike as a weapon and therefore to have an impact on the ruling class. More of this kind of rhetoric is used in the raps delivered by musicians at an organised hip-hop event in the later stages of the film before a full-scale riot breaks out. There are suggestions (backed up by the end credits) that the film is presenting some kind of Marxist analysis of the state of unrest in les cités. This is slightly problematic for me because I’m relying on the subtitles which, as in the cinema version of La haine are mainly translated using American terms. For instance, ‘Cité’ in the dialogue is subtitled as ‘city’ rather than estate, neighbourhood etc.
Music, hip-hop/rap, is an important element of the film and Richet has said it informed the structure and the presentation of the film. ‘White & Spirit’ are credited with the film’s score which includes tracks from other performers some of whom I thought I recognised from La haine. Overall, I’m not sure what I make of this film. I’d like to know more about the production. It seems like Richet was able to mobilise a large number of local residents to play the youths. He also appears in the film himself. Valérie Le Gurun, the film’s DoP also worked on Inner City but in her later career she appears to have worked in TV or part of a camera team. Was she from the same background as Richet? Some of the roles, especially the school teachers, are played by experienced actors, but sometimes the film feels like a community-based production with full industry support. The budget was around £700,000. There is a sense of realism about many of the scenes, oddly heightened by the effect of a grainier image – shot on film, the footage is available online in SD (standard definition) rather than HD. But other aspects of the film seem more fantastical. At one point one of the youths fires a pistol at members of an opposing gang, but they are not ‘live’ bullets. Later on there is a pitched gun battle between two gangs but only one person is hit by what appear to be live bullets and he is carefully shot in the leg. Were the other shots simply a form of bravado? I’m no expert but cars are quickly destroyed and set on fire with their windows smashed by a few kicks.
The police in the film are equally as violent as the youths but because the film is almost plotless apart from the feud between the gangs there is no conventional narrative, no cause and effect for any actions. It may well be that the loosely shot scenes are closer to the reality of conflicts between police and youths in the cités than in more conventional narratives. Apart from La haine and episodes of the TV crime serial Engrenages, we don’t see many of the banlieue films, especially those by directors who are themselves from the banlieues, so it is difficult to judge. I did find the film interesting but I’d like to read more about the film if anyone has references for English language coverage. These kinds of conflict between youths and police flared up again in France in 2005 and the potential for such confrontation appears to still be present.
Here is a trailer. The film is available to rent or buy on YouTube.
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