Khamsa (2008) - film review

Marco is only eleven years old, but he already has a history of delinquency.  His mother, an Algerian, is dead, and his father, a gypsy, has no interest in him.  His reward for setting fire to his stepmother’s caravan is to be taken into care by social services.  Life with his new foster family does not suit Marco, so he runs away and returns to the Marseilles gypsy camp where he grew up.  Here, he is glad to be reunited with his cousin Tony, a midget who hopes to make a fortune through cockfighting, and Coyote, his childhood friend.  Marco’s life takes a dramatic turn when he meets Rachitique, a young Arab from a nearby housing estate who lures him into a life of crime...

In what is arguably the most striking French social drama in a decade, director Karim Dridi takes us on a fantastic voyage into a universe that is as alien to most of us as the terrain of the planet Neptune.  The setting is the social dumping ground of Marseilles, not far from the vibrant working class districts that often feature in the films of Robert Guédiguian.  The characters are aliens in the truest sense of the word - people who live on the very margins of society, in camps that are almost as degrading as the ones constructed by the Nazis during WWII.  These are the people no one wants to know, ignored by the authorities and loathed and feared by everyone outside their community.  We call them gypsies or travellers, but they might as well be unwelcome visitors from another planet.

Khamsa is not a polemic on the plight of modern day gypsies, although such a film certainly deserves to be made.  Neither is it an attempt to enlighten us on the traditions of an overlooked and mistrusted people - Tony Gatlif has pretty well cornered the market in this area with films such as Gadjo dilo (1997) and Swing (2002).   Rather, this is a film about childhood, specifically how the traumas of childhood can be exacerbated when the stable family structure which most of us take for granted does not exist.  Its focus is a rebellious 11-year-old boy who is struggling to find his identity - not an easy task when your mother is in her grave, your father is a self-absorbed alcoholic, your social standing is nil and you are the product of two races (half-gypsy, half-Arab) whose mutual loathing is well-known.  Khamsa is effectively an updated version of Truffaut’s Les 400 coups, offering a portrait of pre-teen angst that is every bit as moving and uncompromising.  It broaches a number of important social themes almost en passant, delivering its messages with an understated humanity rather than boldly lecturing us on the failings of contemporary society.

If Khamsa is an example of social realism, it is a very different species of social realism to the one that is purveyed by Ken Loach and the Dardennes Brothers.  Whilst, like Loach, Dridi captures all the sordid ugliness of life on the margins, never shying away from the injustice and brutality experienced by the socially excluded, he does so with an intensely lyrical and humanist perspective.   Indeed, the most striking things about Khamsa are its sheer poetic beauty and its lust for life.  The characters may be at the bottom of the social heap but they are not miserable.  They are invested with as much dignity and vitality as any human creature and their existence bears scant resemblance to Bunyan's Slough of Despond.   That Dridi is completely immersed in his subject is apparent from the empathy that he appears to have with his characters.  Maybe this is not surprising, since he spent a full year on a gypsy camp in Marseilles before he started filming, and then  spent a further few months coaching his non-professional actors recruited from this site.  In addition to giving authentic insights into the life of a gypsy in modern day France, Dridi also succeeds in evoking how a wild but sensitive 11-year-old boy would see the world around him - not as some dreary social realist pit of despair but a playground of endless wonder, teeming with possibilities.

One’s life experiences are never more rich nor more keenly felt than in childhood, and this comes across almost effortlessly in this film, partly through the sensual cinematography, partly through Dridi’s life-infused mise en scène, but also through the true-to-life performances from the largely non-professional cast.  The star of the film is Marc Cortes, who is extraordinarily convincing as the central character Marco, having much the same impact as the young Jean-Pierre Léaud in Truffaut’s film.  Unselfconscious and completely untainted by histrionic artifice, Cortes reacquaints us with the raw brutality and wonder of those pivotal pre-teen years, imbuing the film with a blistering immediacy.  Khamsa is not the usual social realist wet blanket, the kind of Loachian treatise that is intended to make you angry and switch your vote at the next election.  Far from it.  What it is is a compassionate cry from the heart, an unpretentious, life-affirming work of great power and charm that resonates with a simple truth: a problem child is almost invariably an unloved child.

© James Travers 2010

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