13 m² (2007) - film review

José, Farouk and Réza are three young men from a rough area of Paris.  For them, life is hard and increasingly precarious as they are drawn further and further into crime just to survive.  One day, they attack an armoured van and run off with a sack load of cash.  The robbery hasn’t gone quite as planned and the three friends end up taking refuge in a cramped hide out, where they intend to stay until things have quietened down.   The period of confinement soon begins to take its toll on the three men and it becomes apparent that their real enemy is not the police but each other...

13m² is the latest in a seemingly endless series of films over the past decade or so to thrust into our faces stark visions of the ugly underbelly of French society, reminding us that, despite numerous political initiatives, things are not getting better for those at the bottom of the heap.  It has been well over a decade since Mathieu Kassovitz woke us all up to the escalating problems of social exclusion and racial tensions in inner cities with his startling film La Haine (1995), but these problems haven’t gone away and seem only to have worsened – or so the latest generation of hot-headed young filmmakers will have us believe.

The hot-headed youngster behind this latest grim portrait of social deprivation and urban crime is Barthélémy Grossmann, who not only directs the film but also plays the leading role.  In what is his debut film, Grossmann shows great promise both as a director and an actor, and succeeds admirably in capturing the bleakness of the lives of those unfortunates who have become, through no fault of their own, vermin that live off the putrid dregs of a soulless capitalist system.

The film has one or two touches of brilliance (such as the idea of letting us hear but not see the brutal robbery) but equally there are some careless artistic over-indulgences that cause you to grind your teeth in frustration (the over-use of fancy camera effects such as the fast zoom being a case in point).  13m² is by no means perfect but it does provide a sobering reflection on the corrupting influence of money, as well as a reminder of the fractured society that raw capitalism and countless failed government policies have give us.

© James Travers 2009

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