Je suis né d’une cigogne (1999) - film review

Otto, one of the long-term unemployed, lives with his mother in state housing.  His girlfriend, Louna, works as a hairdresser and lives with an old woman who is being preyed upon by the bailiffs.  Fed up with their meaningless lives they decide to rebel against a system and a society they have grown to despise.  As they set out on their anarchic adventure they are joined by Ali, an intellectual teenage immigrant.  The latter ran away from home as a reaction to his father’s brutal attempts to efface his Arab origins.  Armed with a gun, the three friends steal cars and rob shops when they need to.  On the way, they encounter a stork with an injured wing.  The stork tells them that he is an Algerian refugee who is on his way to stay with his family in Germany.  The three friends adopt the stork, get his wing fixed and set about trying to get a forged passport so that he can cross the Franco-German border.

Je suis né d’une cigogne is both an insanely anarchic portrait of adolescent rebellion and an ingenious parable of social exclusion and immigration in an uncaring society.  Tony Gatlif has already demonstrated his sympathy with the plight of social outcasts and racial minorities in films such as the critically acclaimed Gadjo Dilo, so it is no surprise to see him treading similar ground in this most unconventional of road movies.

Social realism rapidly gives way to black comedy and madcap surrealism in a film which broaches some pressing social issues with precision and well-intended irony.  The four main characters in the film represent some of the most vulnerable sections of our society.  Otto is the unqualified young man from a poor background, one of several thousand French citizens who have no hope of getting a job.   Louna is a poorly paid young woman, exploited and maltreated by her employer and dependent on the generosity of others to make ends meet.  Ali – the most interesting character – is the son of an immigrant who is so keen to integrate his family into French society that he gives his children French names and forces them to eat pork.  Ali’s need to retain his Arab identity is bolstered by an unnatural interest in current affairs and Marxist literature.  Finally, there is the talking stork, a metaphorical stand-in for the illegal immigrant.  By using a stork instead of a human actor, the film’s director, Tony Gatlif, is making a wry comment about the relative freedom of the two species: whereas birds can cross national borders whenever they choose, human beings generally cannot.

Whilst it is overloaded with references to social issues and political theory, this is not a heavy film.  In fact, its haphazard narrative and editing techniques makes it both refreshingly original and surprisingly entertaining – indeed hilariously funny in some places.  It will undoubtedly appeal most to film enthusiasts – the in-jokes and references to French cinema are too numerous to count, making repeated viewing of the film a necessity.  The best examples of this Gatlif humour include a send-up of a film awards ceremony and a sequence in which a taciturn film critic passes judgement on films by rubber stamping them with trite stock phrases – both come within an anorexic gnat’s whisker of the reality which they satirise.

From both its look and its content, Je suis né d’une cigogne feels like a blatant homage to the works of Jean-Luc Godard, one of the leading figures of the French New Wave.  The plot looks like a crazy mélange of Godard’s À bout de souffle , Pierrot le fou  and Weekend, whilst the manic use of jump cutting and over-exposure is Godard’s technique carried to an extreme which even Godard may have considered excessive.  It may seem unlikely but this very unusual visual style works well and the result is something that is far more substantial and worthy than a shameless appropriation of another director’s technique.

The patchwork narrative construction is at first unsettling but it ultimately works rather well.  Not only does it energise what may otherwise have been just another road movie, but it also conveys the rebellious frame of mind of the film’s protagonists.  It also cleverly conceals a major production problem.  When their working relationship became unbearable, Tony Gatlif and Rona Hartner agreed to part company midway through filming.  Hartner was written out of the film and - literally – disappears before our eyes (after daring to pick a fight with the camera).  She later reappears in the film – totally unexpectedly, and without explication, presumably when the behind-the-scenes tantrums had been forgiven.  In a conventional film, this would have been unthinkable, but here it feels so natural that Louna’s temporary disappearance appears to make perfect sence.  Break the rules of cinema as far as Gatlif does in this film and anything is possible...

© James Travers 2004

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