Criticism of 'Paris, 13th district' (DVD): Uncertain future

Nobody expected from the veteran French director Jacques Audiard a film as enraged as ‘Paris, 13th district’, far removed from the classic ‘polar’ that brought him fame and prestige: there is ‘A prophet’ (2009) to prove it. A marginal neighborhood in the City of Light is the setting for this furious portrait of a multiethnic youth, always in search of their particular place in the world, surrounded by fear, twilight, loneliness and death. Their sporadic sexual relations, their anger against a society in which they feel exiled, as well as a future that is at least uncertain, leads these ‘millennials’ towards a fierce nihilism.

There are four characters portrayed in an austere black and white, who lead the charge in this furiously current title, edged by Rone’s percussive soundtrack. Disillusionment and romanticism come together here, while the diaphanous mind opposes technological distraction. In fact, we are looking at adrift thirty-somethings, whom Jacques Audiard catches with his entomologist’s camera, convinced that if they could choose something from everything they’ve lived through, some place and the time that binds them, as well as their passing love affairs, without doubtless they would be dragged into a kind of nostalgia for lost youth, like dust spread in the air.