104 min | R | January 10, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A teenage prank with a circus lion drone footage and a flash-ball gun ignites a Paris housing project already running hot. Three cops in an anti-crime unit spend one day trying to keep a lid on it. By nightfall the lid is gone.
Ladj Ly sets his debut in Montfermeil, the same Paris suburb where Victor Hugo wrote his novel, and the borrowed title is not decoration. This is a film about the people the state has written off and the violence it deputizes to manage them. Stéphane joins an anti-crime brigade on his first day and rides along with two veterans who police the estate through threats, favors, and casual brutality. A stolen lion cub from a Romani circus sets the plot moving, and a panic-fired flash-ball round turns a small crime into a cover-up. Ly builds the day toward a reckoning that has been coming for years.
Damien Bonnard plays Stéphane as the newcomer whose conscience has not yet been ground down. He watches his partners cut corners and you see him calculating how much he can stomach. Alexis Manenti plays Chris as a bully who has convinced himself that cruelty is competence. He swaggers through the projects collecting respect by force and Manenti never softens him into a misunderstood man. Djebril Zonga plays Gwada quiet and complicit, a local kid turned cop who knows these families and aims his weapon anyway. Issa Perica plays the boy Issa with a wounded defiance that anchors the film’s second half.
Ly co-writes with Manenti and Giordano Gederlini, and the script refuses to assign the audience a comfortable side. The standout craft is the drone. A kid named Buzz flies one over the estate to spy on girls, and his footage captures the thing the cops most need buried. Ly turns surveillance into evidence and makes the watcher into the witness. The handheld camera stays low and close in the streets, then lifts into that cold aerial view, and the cut between them tells you who sees and who gets seen.
The final act detonates with the inevitability of a fuse you have watched burn for the entire film. Ly stages it in a stairwell and refuses to release you with a clean resolution. He ends on a frozen image and a Hugo quotation about good and bad soil, and the implication is exact. There are no bad seeds here, only bad ground. The film does not argue this point. It shows you the ground and lets you watch what grows.