France,
1995, 105 min
Shown in 1996
CREDITS
- dir
-
Karim Dridi
- prod
-
Alain Razanes
- scr
-
Karim Dridi
- cam
-
John Mathieson
- editor
-
Lisa Beaulieu
- cast
-
Sami Bouajila, Ouassini Embarek, Nozha Kuouadra, Philippe Ambrosini, Frédéric Andrau
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Karim Dridi in person.
OTHER
The mean streets of Marseille and that city’s dangerous drug trade provide the shadowy backdrop to Tunisian-born director Karim Dridi’s followup to his acclaimed 1994 feature debut Pigalle, which chronicled the seamy night life of Paris’s famous Montmartre district. His new film follows two French-born Arab brothers—the handsome Ismael, 20, and the naïve Mouloud, 14—who flee Paris after a family crisis to settle down with an immigrant uncle living in a dusty quarter of the famous French seaport. Ismael finds work in a local shipyard and is eventually befriended by a white couple. Life gets complicated when the men must defend their relationship against racist jeers and even more so when Ismael falls for his new friend’s girlfriend. Meanwhile, Mouloud is ordered by his family to return to Tunisia, but instead chooses to run away. When Mouloud becomes entangled with a local drug trafficker, the guilt-ridden Ismael must go to his rescue. Dridi tactfully dramatizes the brothers’ encounters with love—fraternal, familial and otherwise—and shapes their bouts with racism without resorting to the cliches of urban violence. In the process, Dridi skillfully evokes the mood of this complicated place while dealing frankly with the complex situations that confront those caught in the sociopolitical swirl of modern France.
FACTOID #10
In 1960, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which has inspired many women to jump into fountains, was pulled from the San Francisco International Film Festival’s program by the distributor and replaced with Roberto Rossellini’s Night over Rome.
