For all that mavericks, outlaws and dissident figures have figured as role models for proponents of a certain free-minded, independent, and adventurous cinema, there are rather few figures who can rightfully claim the designation themselves in an industry where every step in the filmmaking process is monitored, rehashed, and polished. French-Algerian director Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, however, is undoubtedly one of the very few working filmmakers whose topics, characters, referential figures, and work processes have held firmly—boldly, even dangerously—to such an egalitarian, borderless, political, and poetic ideal.
Fiction and performance blend, such that in the same moment we experience the unfolding of scripted events, the occurrence of natural phenomena, and the performances of actors.
After six features full of modern and ancient heroic outlaws he steps into Jean-Pierre Melville territory with LE GANG DES BOIS DU TEMPLE (The Temple Woods Gang), his first straight crime story, complete with thieves, private detectives, vigilantes, henchmen, shadowing, shoot-outs, and cold-blooded vengeance. But anyone familiar with his cinema will recognize his personal take on the genre. On the one hand, the filmmaker here returns to la cité du Bois du temple in the Parisian banlieue of Clichy-sous-bois, just a kilometer away from the one where he grew up and shot his first feature (WESH WESH QU’EST-CE QUI SE PASSE ?, which premiered at the 2002 Forum); the district, despite its enchanting name, remains one of those impoverished dormitory towns whose inhabitants French politicians and media love to both neglect and wield as multipurpose scapegoats. On the other hand, the film is another dark fairy tale, with modern-day Robin Hoods stealing from an Arab Prince and his faithful employee (Mohamed Aroussi and Lucius Barre, respectively), then tracked by an elegant private eye (Slimane Dazi). Before long, an angel, landed on earth as an inconspicuous neighbour (Régis Laroche), delivers these communities which have been living for decades under an iniquitous and invisible domination.
Embracing anachronisms
The script stems from the spectacular robbery of a Saudi prince's convoy in the middle of Paris by half a dozen men in 2014, only one of whom—originating from the Traveller community of Clichy-sous-Bois—confessed his participation while refusing to implicate his comrades. But the narrative is older than the news item it rather faithfully renders; Ameur-Zaïmeche also remembered an urban legend heard as a child, in which travellers from the 13th century had been robbed and tied up around that very same spot, themselves then delivered by an angel. These twinned sources remind us that past or present don’t really matter for Ameur-Zaïmeche, whose cinema always yields to unexpected experiences during production and to the pure presence of things. It fully embraces anachronisms, rhythmic deflations, and geographical inaccuracies, with this film flaunting existing borders to stitch distant locations in Paris, Bordeaux, and Marseille into a seemingly continuous space. In spite of its darkness—carrying the trajectory of his previous film TERMINAL SUD (2019) to new lyrical depths—the mood is regularly punctuated by moments where the action vanishes into a collective, unabated joy, at the local cafe betting on races, feeding birds on the project lawns, or sharing Lebanese street food in a parking lot.
If class struggle remains the structuring principle of a world plunging into chaos a little more each day, Ameur-Zaïmeche’s cinema yields pockets of poetry and freedom in relationships.
In these moments, the film grows out of its script to give full time and space to what is simply happening in front of the camera, grasping that fleeting, opportune moment the Greeks called kairos. Fiction and performance blend, such that in the same moment we experience the unfolding of scripted events, the occurrence of natural phenomena, and the performances of actors. In the past, Ameur-Zaimeche has occasionally cast himself in certain roles, less in in the style of a classic director-actor dynamic than for the ability to direct a scene from the inside, to the point of entering the frame unannounced in LES CHANTS DE MANDRIN (2011) to shout a forgotten line to a confused Jacques Nolot. Such moments are testaments of the director’s ability to liberate the script, with vanished actions opening a purely poetic space where all living things are treated equal, where characters are delivered from the weight of determinism, and where it again becomes possible for a community to treat and heal themselves.
Pockets of poetry
Music—and the impact of its performance—provides a space for fiction and the reality behind it to coalesce, and there are two major musical moments in LE GANG DES BOIS DU TEMPLE. The first features a largely forgotten Breton songwriter from the 1970s, Annkrist, singing heartbreaking truths about love at the funeral of the protagonist’s mother. The second sees the Arab prince, whom it was previously difficult to imagine as anything other than an old, emaciated man, removing his elegant bisht to dance energetically on the stage of a nightclub alongside modern raï musician Sofiane Saidi, later joined by Ameur-Zaïmeche regular Rodolphe Burger. These two performances—one delivered by an aging body worn down by time, the other by an ageless, shapeshifting trickster—establish the film’s moral and visual spectrum, opposing the dark backstages where power reigns to the friendships and affiliations carried out in broad daylight.
If class struggle remains the structuring principle of a world plunging into chaos a little more each day, Ameur-Zaïmeche’s cinema yields pockets of poetry and freedom in relationships. It’s everywhere: in one thief’s proposition to offer his haul to buy a prosthetic hand to his friend; in the way the gang cares about their lonely, quiet neighbour; in a man’s grief for his mother, remembered by all for her secret pancake recipe, and how his vengeance again the Prince seem to permit a sense of liberty for the community. Something here always escapes the infernal reproduction of domination. Human bonds can’t, and won’t be reduced to oppression, as Annkrist sings with her beautiful, trembling and raspy voice: “l’amour ne fait pas l’esclave mais des volontaires / il faut avoir la peau suave et des nerfs de fer".1Love doesn't make slaves but volunteers / it is necessary to have nerves of iron and suave skin.
Antoine Thirion is a French film critic and a programmer at Cinéma du Réel.
