Les Hauts murs (2008)

Les Hauts murs is a French film first released in 2008, directed by Christian Faure.  The film is based on a novel by Auguste Le Breton and stars Carole Bouquet, François Damiens, Emile Berling, Pascal N’Zonzi and Michel Jonasz.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


France, some time between the wars.  After his father was killed in WWI, Yves Tréguier was adopted by the state and placed in the care of institutions and individuals that saw him more as a burden than a child.  Aged 14, tired of being humiliated and locked up, Yves breaks out of his orphanage and goes on the run.  He is soon recaptured by the authorities and ends up in a youth rehabilitation centre that is renowned for its harshness.  Here, he must not only endure severe treatment by the staff, who treat him like a hardened criminal, but also victimisation by some of his fellow inmates.  He also makes a few friends, including Fil de fer, the abandoned son of a bourgeois family, who has a passion for music that infects his comrades.   The soul-destroying routine and barbarity of this terrible establishment soon begins to erode Yves’s morale and he makes up his mind that he must escape, so that he can start a new life in America...

The opening sequence of Les Hauts murs immediately brings to mind the abrupt, ambiguous and poignant ending to François Truffaut’s Les 400 coups.  A 14-year-old boy is on the run, from whom or what we do not yet know.  His flight takes him to a deserted beach.  The immense expanse of sea before him represents the freedom he desperately craves, but it is in fact just another barrier, and he is soon recaptured and returned to the hell from which he had hoped to escape.  Yet, whilst it has an obvious resonance with Truffaut’s film, Les Hauts murs is an altogether more brutal and unromantic depiction of childhood neglect.  It is a film which recounts a past injustice which is so extreme that today’s audience will struggle to accept it as true (even though it is, down to the last dot and comma), and at the same time it powerfully supports the argument that delinquency is the result of nurture, not of nature, that criminals are made, not born.

Les Hauts murs is a faithful adaptation of the 1954 autobiographical novel of Auguste Le Breton, one of France’s best known writers of crime fiction.  Many of Le Breton’s books have been adapted for cinema, including such classics as Du rififi chez les hommes, Le Clan des siciliens and Bob le flambeur.  Before he became a writer, Le Breton was a habitué of the Parisian underworld, a direct consequence of his being placed in a so-called Maison d’Education (a sick euphemism for juvenile prison) when he was a teenager after his father was killed in action during the First World War.  Le Breton’s fate was not uncommon in the 1920s and 1930s - hundreds (if not thousands) of children found themselves in similar institutions and brought up in a regime better suited to hardened gangsters; their crime: to be the offspring of men who got themselves killed on the battlefields of WWI.  Le Breton’s novel is uncompromising in its account of the inhuman, dehumanising brutality that was routinely meted out to impressionable and extremely vulnerable youngsters, and in his inspired screen adaptation director Christian Faure does not shy away from the daily horrors that confronted Le Breton in his traumatic adolescence.

This is Christian Faure’s first film for the cinema, and apart from one or two slips (such as a slight tendency to over-egg the pudding in the more emotional scenes), he does a remarkably good job, successfully combining the harsh earthy reality of Le Breton’s novel with his own poetic, humanist vision.  Prior to this, Faure had distinguished himself with his films for French television, notably the sensitive WWII drama Un amour à taire (2005), which subsequently enjoyed a limited theatrical release outside France.  Les Hauts murs is Faure’s best work to date, a film that is both harrowing and compelling, well-written, beautifully photographed and exquisitely performed by a highly talented cast.   You only have to compare it with  Christophe Barratier’s limp-wristed  Les Choristes (2004), which covers similar ground far less effectively, to see what a fine piece of cinema this is.  (The lukewarm reaction from the critics when the film was first released in France is mystifying, to say the least.)

Les Hauts murs is a film that grabs the attention and, no matter what it throws at us, we remain hooked. The austere mise-en-scène and fluid camerawork draw us into the protagonist’s nightmare world and we become not merely spectators but prisoners in this same reality, hemmed in on all sides by totally insensitive warders and impregnable walls which shut out both light and hope.  The relentless torrent of abuse that we witness is almost too much to stomach, and yet the violence we see never seems to be gratuitous - it is there to show us how things were, to show how a closed regime can become totally desensitised to brutality and how innocent youngsters may be transformed into dangerous, conscienceless thugs by an abject lack of compassion.  

The main strength of Les Hauts murs is the extraordinary sense of reality that the young actors playing the brutalised adolescents brings to their performances.  Making an auspicious screen debut as the lead juvenile is Emile Berling, looking uncannily like a young Jean-Pierre Léaud and showing something of his father (Charles Berling)’s talent for stealing the focus and compelling us to sympathise with his character’s plight.  Whilst Berling’s charismatic presence absorbs most of our attention, it is not possible to overlook the contributions from his equally talented and slightly more experienced co-stars, Julien Bouanich, Jonathan Reyes and Guillaume Gouix, who are all excellent.   There is a touching, suitably brief appearance by Carole Bouquet, which serves to drive home the mindblowing extent of the injustice and savagery of a system that failed a generation of lost children and simply turned them into hardened monsters.

Les Hauts murs is an absorbing piece of drama but it is far from being a comfortable watch.   The grim portrait it paints of neglect and abuse is depressing , and the moments of solace are few and far between.  Some of its more shocking moments hit you like a knuckleduster punch in the face and leave you stunned and shaken.  Yet, tough-going as the film is, it has a charm and authenticity that somehow carry us through it.  As the end credits roll, we are left not only with a huge lump in our throats but also with the keenest hope that those who are charged with reforming today’s youngsters do not come anywhere near the barbarity that Auguste Le Breton and many others experienced in their youth, the neglected children of France’s fallen war heroes.

© James Travers 2011

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My father, who was an orphan, spent a few years in the same type of prison. It was in Mettray, next to the city of Tours in France.  Many documents can be found in the French archives about this place but most of the files about the Colons themselves are missing (destroyed ).  I have some documents about my father and I can confirm that the events shown in this movie are not the worst that happened in such places.
Robert Braconnier (France)

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