THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
One of the first sequences of promises plants us in full shipwreck. Flooded corridors and landings, dripping ceilings, men and women struggling to control the disaster with the means at hand (brooms, buckets, mops). The pipes have failed, the liner is taking on water, ready to sink. The liner: in reality, a bar of a building in the city of Bernardins, located in the Parisian suburbs, which constitutes both the anchor point and the challenge of the second feature film by Thomas Kruithof. The crux of the war that occupies each of the characters, determines their actions, and from which their personality is defined.
First, the mayor of the suburb in question, Clémence (Isabelle Huppert), who, after two terms, is preparing to give way to her first deputy (Naidra Ayadi) and, no doubt, to leave politics for good. Decision taken without remorse or regret, on condition of winning its last fight: obtaining, for the Bernardins and its three thousand dwellings, the subsidy of sixty-three million that the State plans to allocate to one of the insalubrious housing estates of the Grand Paris. Clémence made this promise to her constituents, she wants to keep her word. She benefits from precious help in the person of Yazid (Reda Kateb), her ambitious chief of staff, who, from the city, knows all the residents.
Chosen in touch with reality
Side by side, linked by a long-standing complicity and mutual esteem, the mayor and his right-hand man lead the battle on the ground and in the offices of the Elysée. This provides the film with complex, biting and purely political material to which the filmmaker and his screenwriter Jean-Baptiste Delafon (co-author with Eric Benzekri of the Canal+ series dark baron, 2016) did not concede anything. Not even a few scenes likely to tell us about the past of the characters. The promises remains faithful to the narrative line that governs its subject: to show the way in which local power is exercised. A subject that depicts elected officials in touch with reality, close to the inhabitants and their concerns, forced to deal with the best (the associative fabric) as well as the worst (the slum merchants) and to restore confidence when everything is screwing up. camp.
It is with this human material that the film rubs shoulders and that it restores through the concrete. The action of elected officials but also that of men and women fighting, day by day, to save their homes and obtain more decent living conditions. Whether they are owners who have saved all their lives to buy an apartment which is no longer worth anything today, or simple tenants. Some, grouped in an association, decide not to pay their charges until the premises are renovated. While, for their part, slum dealers enrich themselves by renting unsanitary spaces to the poorest (especially asylum seekers).
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