While Emmanuel Macron is traveling to Marseille, on Twitter, Marine Le Pen recommends seeing “Bac Nord”. A “compatible far right” film?
Emmanuel Macron’s trip to Marseille has been making the headlines since September 1, 2021. The central subject of the presidential visit to Marseille? Safety, a favorite theme of the National Gathering. It is therefore logical that its leader Marine Le Pen spoke on Twitter. But what is more surprising is that she recommends him a trip to the cinema, in order to see the film. BAC North.
The film, signed Cédric Jimenez (French), takes place in the northern districts of Marseille and revisits real events. It features a team of BAC agents who, for the purposes of an investigation, take an active part in the local drug trafficking. In the casting, we find Gilles Lellouche or François Civil in muscular cops and not really concerned with the rules. If Marine Le Pen’s film advice may at first glance surprise, it will not surprise critics of the film. Foremost among them the Irish critic Fiachra Gibbons who, during the press conference of North Bac during the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, the film team had questioned its impact a few months before the presidential election.
“Bac Nord”, a reactionary film?
“I saw that and I say to myself: maybe I’ll vote for Le Pen after that. The people of the estates are just … just beasts, what, in fact. The film is great, but there is has a problem there. We are in an election year “, declared Fiachra Gibbons to the film crew, yet hilarious in front of the journalist. A sequence that had been around social networks. August 18, 2021, release day from North Bac At the movie theater, Liberation did not mince its words either and denounced the clichés conveyed about the city of Marseille, not to mention a virilist bias, young people from animalised neighborhoods, not to mention women who are little and poorly represented. “Trend fifty shades of right against a background of false Marseille accent, the demago and virilist film of Cédric Jimenez is failed as much in its execution as in its intentions”, can we read in the article of our colleagues.
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Since the controversy at the Cannes Film Festival, the director Cédric Jimenez tries, tries very well, to defend his work. “On the contrary, with this film I tried to tell the story of areas that have great difficulties, so that can seem really hostile. But I do not think that we should settle that with a radical vote like Marine le Pen. at all…”, he explained, for example, to Fiachra Gibbons. But the tweet of the boss of the National Gathering confirms the discomfort and proves the relevance of the words of the AFP journalist in Cannes. And this questioning of the Head of State by Marine Le Pen proves that cultural works have a political impact, even when their author defends himself against any form of activism.