Criss-Cross: Een wereld van zware jongens, smerissen en terroristen

Olaf Möller

Arguably the unluckiest film of 2016 was James Watkin’s grossly underrated political action thriller Bastille Day. Its world première was postponed in reaction to the attacks in Paris on Friday 13, 2015. Then its French release, scheduled for July 13 2016 to coincide with the titular event, was cut short by the Nice attack (July 14). The next day, the film was taken off local screens. When it finally opened in the US, the title was changed to the nondescript The Take so as to not look like an attempt to cash in on the ‘tragedy’. Seems this film hit a nerve. But when Bastille Day went into production in 2013, the wave of terrorist activities sweeping Europe since mid-2014 was nowhere to be foreseen – or was it?

French multiplex patrons with a passion for tougher home-made crime cinema might say that movies here are constantly talking about politics – who kills whom and then fingers whom. Consequently, they address problems usually brought up in connection with terrorism: a middle class on the brink of collapse due to an endless series of worldwide financial crises, xenophobia, the (ir)resistible rise of right-wing populism and a liberal/left-wing/bourgeois/academic/artistic establishment’s gruesome cluelessness in finding useful, hands-on answers to this very real threat, et cetera.

Didn’t Frédéric Schoendoerffer use the term ‘Opération Satanique’ in Agents secrets (2004) to talk about the way (not only) French secret services are involved in a global strategy of tensions (remember Operation Gladio)? And who knows, really, who is behind ISIL/Dāʿish, al-Qāʿidah, you name ‘em? Doesn’t Philippe Haïm’s Secret défense (2008) suggest similarities too close for comfort – nay outright ties – between the secret services and their terrorist ‘others’? Olivier Masset-Depasse may talk about the bloody 1980s in Sanctuaire (2015), but this story of how the state plays and pays insurgent and vigilante groups, how nationalist armed activists with an anti-Fascist agenda can be turned into enemies of the state better killed than caught and tried, is easily applicable to other situations, countries, conflicts. And while the ‘short twentieth century’ may have ended on November 9th 1989, the ‘long nineteenth century’ – with its colonial economics and global political strategies only a (self-)selected few could develop and execute – is still very much alive. Just look at Éric Valette’s Un affaire d'état (2009) or Mathieu Kassovitz’ L'ordre et la morale (2011): how they talk about the remnants of France’s erstwhile empire apropos botched (para)military interventions and secret dealings with insurgents of all ilks. Or, more allegorically, how the shadow of the Algerian War still looms over French life, as exemplified in Olivier Panchot’s De guerre lasse (2014) or Julien Leclercq’s Braqueurs (2015). It’s all there.

And the movies knew. They spoke of the miasma we wade through 24/7 in a language everybody understands: that of popular cinema and genre films. Olivier Marchal (36 Quai des Orfèvres, 2004), Franck Mancuso (R.I.F. (Recherches dans l'intérêt des familles), 2011), Fred Cavayé (Mea culpa, 2014): they know the rules of their chosen genre by heart. And they respect them, because they’re keenly aware of the fact their audience does too – there is a lot they doesn’t need to tell. It’s a crime movie, this is the way things work here. Real life may not work like that, but under this set of rules it does. Which doesn’t mean you cannot twist and tweak things – actually that’s a key part of the rules: they are flexible, not iron-clad.

So why then is this cinema (as well as its TV variant: series like the Olivier Marchal-created Braquo, 2009-16, and miniseries like Éric Valette’s soon-to-air Dans l’ombre du tueur, 2017), so little known outside of France, while the latest in Gallic horror at the same time is potentially conquering the world? Sure, genre aficionados have seen these – usually on DVD, late-night TV or at very specialised festivals – and sure, auteurs like Dominik Graf (IFFR retrospective 2013) know what they have in colleagues like Schoendoerffer. But what these days passes for the middle-ground in film culture (in terms of festivals as well as text outlets) is either ignorant or disinterested. In the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, the equivalents of Valette, Schoendoerffer, Marchal – Yves Boisset, Alain Corneau, Jacques Deray – were major figures of French cinema, whose works won awards in all the right places, got distributed, were recognized by audiences and critics alike – not all critics, but enough to make them a cultural force. A force that needs to be awakened again: a popular cinema that takes its audience seriously – as part of the body politic.

The French presidential elections are immanent, and a catastrophe on the scale of Brexit and Trump beckons. Éric Valette’s Le serpent aux milles coupures (2017) shows us its scope – but maybe also how to face it.