French director Houda Benyamina's masterful first film Divines has been called a "feminist Scarface." Make no mistake, machismo is alive and well in France and as a French woman it's exhilarating to see gender-flipped takes on the classics that I love to hate-watch, but Divines' merits aren't reducible to its feminist bona fides. The film, which won the Golden Camera award at Cannes and won three of the seven César awards it was nominated for—Best First Feature Film, Best Supporting Actress, and Most Promising Actress—is about two teenage best friends, Dounia (Oulaya Amamra) and Maïmouna (Déborah Lukumuena), who while away their lives in a banlieue, or marginalized exurb, of Paris by shoplifting and covertly watching dance rehearsals in the local performance space.
Resourceful, fiercely loyal, and hot-headed, Dounia lives in a Roma camp and dreams of overcoming the humiliations of poverty. She becomes her household's breadwinner, working for charismatic kingpin Rebecca (Jisca Kalvanda) as a drug runner before graduating to a dangerous, lucrative mission that ends in tragedy. These three characters don't fit neatly into any prefabricated schema, whether it's the subservient position women are thought to be confined to in the banlieues or the stereotypically male roles of petty criminal or political rebel.
Divines holds up next to any white male auteur's coming of age narrative in the French canon, be it The 400 Blows or The Life Before Us. It offers, to beautiful effect, the customary ingredients of these movies: it's by turns deadpan, crude, funny, and devastatingly sad; poetically stylized passages alternate with harsh realism. Not merely content to meet the standards of classic French cinema, Divines also plays with its male-centric codes and pulverizes them. Dounia and Maïmouna are the prototypical upstarts from a mobster movie. Rebecca, a rare female authority figure in this genre, drives the gender-flipping conceit home with an appreciative remark about Dounia's recklessness: "You've got clitoris," Rebecca says, instead of "you've got balls."
Dounia fills the shoes of a male gangster movie protagonist with ease. Hungry for success and bound by a personal code of honor, she puts money and friendship before all else, including school and her sexy (but secondary) male love interest Djigui. Dounia even takes on an actively patriarchal role: she protects and provides for her mother, but also exacts revenge on a fellow gang member for having sex with her.
Dounia is more than a woman acting out a male role, though. In the film's final act, the tomboyish protagonist goes undercover and femme to seduce and rob Rebecca's ex-associate Reda. In her club getup, Dounia looks younger and frailer than ever; the viewer is painfully aware of her vulnerability to violence, particularly sexual violence. But the eventual scene of a helpless damsel at the mercy of a monstrous man is subverted. Dounia is still Dounia no matter how she's dressed, and after an admittedly frightening struggle she knocks Reda out cold. The scene is realistic in that a young woman dealing with dangerous men probably would be at risk for sexual violence, but that doesn't invalidate Dounia's previously established ability to fight through anything using sheer force of will. In other words, Divines does not take place in a utopia where the patriarchy is abolished or inverted. It takes place in reality, where women regularly take on life's challenges and dangers without asking whether, as women, they are allowed to do so.
Rebecca, Dounia, and Maïmouna are in vibrant contradiction not only with female protagonists we're accustomed to seeing in gangster movies but also with other fictional characters, namely women from the banlieues as imagined by media on the left and right and by films like Céline Sciamma's Girlhood. Sciamma has admitted that the script she wrote for the film was not based on research or personal knowledge of black girls in the banlieues but motivated by her fascination with them. The same seems true of sensationalist media narratives about young people in the banlieues—narratives of women cowering before violent (usually Muslim) men who control female sexuality.
Naturally, in Girlhood, women fall silent and subdued whenever a group of men enters their space and the protagonist, Meriem, has a physically abusive brother who punishes her for having sex. It would be easier to say Girlhood and Divines simply depict different sides of the same experience if the young women in Divines weren't so vivid and full of personality compared to Girlhood's underdeveloped sketches, if Benyamina's camera didn't gaze into the souls of the characters while Sciamma's just stares at their bodies.
Far from the concern-trolling exemplified by Girlhood, Divines is much more comparable—thematically and quality-wise—to Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine. The 1995 movie, hailed as the voice of a generation, features three friends wandering around Paris the day after a riot against police brutality in their banlieue. One of them finds a gun dropped by a cop and we spend the rest of the film in Chekhovian suspense: will he take revenge on the police? La Haine continues to be relevant as communities of color now call for accountability for the death of Adama Traoré and the brutal sexual assault of a young man named Théo, both at the hands of the police.
Divines does critique the police for its role in the neighborhoods it is meant to make safer, especially with its ending, a similar but even more tragic and accusatory variation on the finale of La Haine. But the central struggle of Divines is economic, not political. The three young men in La Haine hang around and fume against injustice—idiomatically, "ils ont la haine." Violence becomes an existential question, the specter of a possibility of empowerment. As for Dounia and Rebecca, they use violence when material necessity compels them to but they don't seek to find meaning through it—perhaps because they can pick and choose what aspects of masculinity they want to take on instead of having to prove their worth through violence. The protagonists of Divines are, in their own words, focused on "money, money, money!" They represent today's generation of young people, for whom material success is the only meaningful goal that still seems attainable. The endgame is to become rich enough that racism, sexism and classism can no longer keep them from living their lives. It's not that they are apolitical; they're just rightfully apathetic about a political system that has not changed a jot since La Haine.
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