THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – MUST SEE
Since the big feeling ofa prophet, by Jacques Audiard, in 2009, it seemed that the intersection of the prison film and the Corsican mafia was scorched earth for French cinema, notwithstanding the fifteen years that separate us from this beautiful French acclimatization to genre cinema. Stéphane Demoustier (The Girl with the Bracelet, 2020) will have decided otherwise for his fourth feature film, moreover inspired by a news item. He does it all the more at his own risk as Borgo features, like the little thug played by Tahar Rahim in Audiard’s film, a character who plays his skin, banking on his strategic sense of survival to get by in the basket of prison crabs (and here island) which surrounds it.
Her name in this case is Melissa, Hafsia Herzi plays her, she is an experienced prison guard at Borgo prison, in Corsica, where she has just moved with her family – Djibril, the unemployed husband, and a young girl – to try to give her life a fresh start. A double coincidence ignites the engine of the story. On the one hand, the meeting in Borgo of a young inmate, Saveriu (Louis Memmi), whom she previously knew in a prison on the continent and with whom she developed a sort of sympathy. Then, the entry into problematic rental matters, with a racist and angry neighbor who immediately attacks the little girl and her father, Djibril, at the foot of their building.
The connection between these two events is almost self-evident. Beneath his appearance as a nice guy, Saveriu, a member of a powerful island gang, is worried about Melissa’s concern, who herself was weak enough to confide it to him, and takes it upon himself to remove the thorn that this sanguine neighbor planted it in his foot. Two members of the gang come without delay to pay him a friendly visit, which resolves any hint of conflict in about a minute and converts him to the neighbors’ party. This service is obviously not provided for nothing. He obliges the young woman, even if she had not asked for anything.
Necessary culture of compromise
The spiral is thus opened with a chain of obligations which will go from the small service rendered on occasion to involvement in a settling of scores. Mafia pressure, fear, the lure of profit, the fierce desire to save one’s family are all elements here that would help explain this process.
What the film has best lies in the revelation of this insidious mechanism which, both in prison and island reality, is based on a necessary culture of compromise to lead, in certain cases, to the pure and simple transgression of the law. .
You have 17.6% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.