Liberal Talk Radio

As satisfying as it sounds, I find it difficult to believe that Mathieu Kassovitz was the first one to figure out that s**t was f**ked up in the Parisian suburbs, as the New York Times’ Alan Riding seems to be saying:

So life often imitates art. Yet with the recent uprisings in some French immigrant neighborhoods, this cliché came with a new twist: art, in the form of movies and rap music, has long been warning that French-born Arab and black youths felt increasingly alienated from French society and that their communities were ripe for explosion.

Certainly anyone who saw Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 film “Hate” had no reason to be surprised by this fall’s violence. At the time, Mr. Kassovitz’s portrayal of a seething immigrant Paris banlieue (or suburb), even his choice of title, seemed shocking and exaggerated. Today, the movie could almost pass for a documentary.

In “Hate,” burning cars light up the soulless space between high-rise public housing projects as residents protest the beating of a young Arab, Ahmed. “Don’t forget, the police kill,” graffiti on the wall proclaim. Three angry, restless youths - a Jew, an Arab and a black - visit Ahmed at the hospital and are themselves beaten by the police. They plan revenge.

. . .

Even in the mid-1990’s, though, “Hate” was hardly an isolated protest. Rather, it spawned a genre known as banlieue movies, which explored the problems of children of Arab and African immigrants and effectively announced the birth of a new “lost generation.” (Coline Serreau’s “Chaos” also focused on young Arab women trying to escape male-run households.) The message of these films was uniformly disturbing.

Why did these movies not ring alarm bells? Clearly, screen fiction has a distancing effect: it is “only” telling a story. Yet television documentaries and news reports can have much the same result. For most middle-class French, nightly car burnings and police clashes with stone-throwing youths have been taking place on their television screens, not in their neighborhoods.

Where fiction has an advantage portraying reality is in giving individual faces to well-documented social and economic problems. Banlieue movies have also proved more effective in analyzing these problems than have newspapers and politicians, who, of late, have variously expressed shock and surprise, as if the riots were as unpredictable as a natural disaster.

Just to put this into perspective, would you take a Frenchman seriously if he asked why no one listened the disturbing message in NWA’s prescient “F**k Tha Police,” which basically sounded the alarm a full four years before Rodney King? I didn’t think so!