The films of Ladj Ly, heir apparent to the mantle of France’s street-level cinéma de banlieue, land with the force of molotov cocktails – scorching, destructive and imprecise. His narrative debut Les Misérables took the jury prize at Cannes for its viscerally rendered tensions between immigrant populations and brutal police squads in the state-forsaken suburbs, undercut by a noncommittal final tableau that implicitly asked why we can’t all just get along. He co-authored the script for longtime friend Romain Gavras’s drama Athena, which applied a similar formal elan to a clash between the penniless disaffected and the riot cops, then concluded with another ambiguous partial exoneration for the aggressors. For all his well-founded resentment toward those at the top of an oppressive power structure, he always reserves some obligatory measure of alarm that those at the bottom will go too far as well.
“This film is not about turning anyone into a hero, nor is it accusing anyone,” Ly writes in the press notes for his sophomore effort, a splashy world premiere here at the Toronto international film festival. “That would be too easy.” He’s back in the director’s chair on Les Indésirables, and back in the projects; his latest explosion of capital-C Commentary takes place in an impoverished housing block set for demolition, forcing the African and Middle Eastern residents to either relocate or cram themselves into a slum-to-be with drastically reduced square footage. Coming from an ex-con native to this milieu, the heat of Ly’s righteous, hard-earned rage radiates off the screen. But as one rebel finds after torching a sign touting the bright new future of his soon-to-be-leveled home, fires are easy to start and difficult to control.
