Mes frères et moi

This one is an involving companion piece to Ladji Li's 2019 LES MISERABLES - immigrants struggle while the gendarmes hover round their mass housing. Plausibly eleven year old Maël Rouin Berrandou can't wait to quit school but his three brothers make dodgy role models and their comatose mother in the bedroom needs constant care.

The pressure is to become a pizza delivery boy but, while painting the corridor on a bogus educational leisure project at the school where he's still enrolled, Berrandou encounters Judith (CAMILLE REWINDS) Chemla's small singing class, recognising the Italian opera arias his late father used to play.

Between going look out for drug runs, beach soccer and getting roughed up by his family, our hero edges towards being an Arab Billy Elliot. The plausible surface, engaging characters and inconclusive ending all give this conviction. Despite the grim material it manages to be lively entertainment.

Skillful handling uses available light and real locations effectively giving the impression of a realistic texture.

Steadiest and durable french film made lately, feels like much of the production have been best of luck, and retakes isnt a word in the director vocabulary...

but it tells a story about summer, love among siblings and mutual hate between relative, its a film about when the wind passes over the epiglyttal valves, and a young boys love to the musical arts of opera, at the cap adge district of mediterranean france, with beutiful beaches and surprising bays and coves... so it maybe worth a look.

The cast mostly delivers ok, there are some wow-moments of nightingale singing, and gangsterwraps, but its mostly a story in french and for french. A small recommend from the grumpy old man.

Ok so we have our 12-year old hero (not 14 as it says in the blurb in the film his brother says you cannot leave school as you are not 13 yet) living in Council Housing in Sète with a clan of 3 other brothers and their mum bedridden in a coma in the back room

They are bent on keeping her there and not in a soulless medical institution

One of the brothers deals drugs one is a rentboy/gigolo the eldest is a brute focussed on keeping the show on the road which he does excellently and yes brutally

Never quite clear why but our hero here has been roped into a holiday community service scheme where he gets further brutalized by the supervisor. Brutality is the backdrop the wallpaper of the entire piece with flashes of Love here and there

It paints a world that is ruthless and desperate

So whilst on the holiday community service the young boy hears the strains of opera from a summer class (all girls) led by a professional semi-famous opera singer and this resonates with him as he is a fan of Pavarotti's greatest hits tunes his supposed Italian father sang to his now comatose mother ...

Touching is is not?

And thereafter you are watching a weaving of the two worlds complete with police brutality on the estates and its own native brutality interspersed with Arias .... so yes very Billy Elliot in terms of CLASS and taste contrast

Extremely well-handled by filmmaker and all actors; it was short-listed at Cannes. I am as a spectator seeing more and more really great films coming out of the "Émigration" the Moghrebi diaspora in France (maybe check in my reviews for other titles). The protagonists here are all 4th or 5th generation and use no Arabic at any point and probably know none; they are a French economic underclass with few choices opened to them

This is what makes this tales poignant the chasm between "Les Cités" (the estates) and Opera which is the perceived music of the Bourgeoisie. Nour would be "expected" to listen to rap like his drug-dealing brother but has a taste for Opera (Italian dad)

So it is a cultural code-breaking tale like Billy Elliott. And a moving one.