The 1993 setting of Danielle Arbid’s story of a young Lebanese girl’s coming of age as an immigrant in Paris is doubtlessly not an arbitrary one, but probably chosen to reflect the time of the director’s own experience of arriving and fending for herself in France. If setting PARISIENNE back over twenty years ago means that it loses a lot in terms of contemporary relevance and the edge generated by more recent French youth films like Laurent Cantet’s THE CLASS and Céline Sciamma’s GIRLHOOD, it shows at least just how far the subject and associated issues around race and immigration have moved on in such a relatively short space of time.
Some of those wider social issues inevitably come up in PARISIENNE, but it would be wrong to assume that their handling is cursory and superficial. The film’s subject is focussed more on the life experience of an 18 year old Lebanese girl in a foreign land, where the behaviour of men and simply putting a roof over her head is a rather more immediate concern. Fleeing from the unpleasant advances of her uncle, Lina leaves the only relatives she has in France and tries to make it own her own, enrolling in classes at the University, making some friends, and through them finding a place to sleep at night while she seeks to make her position legal and avoid deportation.
Lina does face prejudice and experience race hatred, but not always in the way you might expect.
The focus of the film on a young girl’s experience and discovery of life and love is made clearer in the French title of the film, PEUR DE RIEN (‘Afraid of nothing’), whereas the application of the term “Parisienne” to Lina is loaded with race implications that the film is unable to address in any way convincingly. Lina does face prejudice and experience race hatred, but not always in the way you might expect. For a while Lina naively becomes friends with and hangs around with a group of skinhead racists who want to bring royalty back to France in order to sort out what is wrong with “our country”. While this is probably based on a true experience, it might not be the most common one for ethnic minorities, and it risks glossing over serious issues.
More than that, however, as far as being a purely a film experience, PARISIENNE lacks the kind of conflict and drama that might better engage an audience. Again, consideration of the film’s original working title, “Faire connaissance avec la France” (‘Getting to know France’), points towards a kind of naivety that is all too evident in the film; even if it is one that reflects Lina’s own experience. As merely a coming of age story, Arbid’s film is more interested in detailing the various romantic relationships Lina has with a variety of men, but even here it lacks any real depth of feeling, glossing over the break-ups and disappointments that Lina experiences with the men in her life. She seems to be lucky to emerge from some potentially serious situations relatively unscathed. There’s no strong directorial vision here, either, or the kind of personal stamp in the use of period detail that a director like André Téchiné could bring to this kind of material.
If the film does succeed in engaging the audience, then, allowing them to sympathise and care about the outcome of Lina’s journey, it’s in a large part down to a sympathetic central performance from Manal Issa, but it is also because the film sticks resolutely to its own path without letting the other issues take over and dominate. PARISIENNE/PEUR DE RIEN is meant to be inspirational, showing that the challenges and social barriers that Lina faces need not determine who you are as a person, but with self-belief and trust you can succeed on your on your own terms. The very existence of this film, written and directed by someone who has undoubtedly had similar experiences – even though the story itself is reportedly not directly autobiographical – is itself testament to this belief.
https://belfastfilmfestival.org/
httpvh://youtu.be/soBQE_ujiKc