I have just discovered this film dating from 1988 and I had a priori never seen films by Jean-Claude Brisseau.
I found this film disturbing and interesting. The film describes a suburb of the Seine Saint Denis as a place of desolation and perdition where young adolescents go to war and come to kill each other out of boredom and neglect of their parents added to a situation without prospects. We are not so far from the various facts that happen nowadays, with the difference that here the majority of party troubles are Caucasian and that the leaders are girls even more extreme than the boys. The other women are dealing with an aggressive and ruthless patriarchal society treated as objects, ordered or raped. In this dismal painting we follow the story of Bruno, a 13-year-old boy whose mother is never there because she is working to be able to find him accommodation in a more livable place. Bruno meets a neighbor and comrade who feels abandoned by his father and is in revolt against society. His father shoots rifles in his own apartment, makes a living from scheming and terrorizes the whole building. In the middle of this morbid equation, bits of poetry in the world of phantasy in which Bruno escapes, that of birds, and of a mysterious white lady, object of desire and fantasy. The film does not seem to provide an answer to the social and human idleness of the suburbs, but seems to point to the lack of inter-generational communication and class violence as the triggering scourge.
