Les Invisibles (2019)
Directed by Louis-Julien Petit

Film Review

In common with many countries in Europe today, homelessness is a growing phenomenon in France, adding to an increasing sense of widespread social disintegration as successive governments fail to come to grips with the inequalities and injustices that blight the French landscape.  Surprisingly, it is a subject that so far has inspired few filmmakers in France - Gerard Jugnot's lightweight comedy Une époque formidable (1991) being a rare example of a mainstream film that broached the subject with any degree of sincerity.

For his third feature, director Louis-Julien Petit takes his cue from the British social realist filmmaker Ken Loach (Kes, Riff-Raff) and delivers a heart-warming social comedy that leaves us in no doubt that homelessness is a matter that concerns us all.   The fact that the film managed to attract an impressive audience of 1.3 million in France would seem to imply as much; with the country's tally of homeless people estimated to be around 150 thousand at the present time it's hardly surprising that the issue has attracted so high a level of public interest.

Les Invisibles is as much about solidarity as it is about the ordeals of the homeless, and rightly so as the only way the matter will ever be resolved is through the collective action of committed individuals striving to ensure that no human being in a supposedly civilised state goes without a roof over his or her head.  The film, unusually, focuses exclusively on women, countering a widely held misconception that the majority of homeless people are drug-addicted or alcoholic men.  By limiting his scope to the plight of homeless women, Petit makes us even more aware of the human cost of homelessness, of the indignities that must be endured and the immense psychological harm that can result, to say nothing of the social waste.

Like the director's debut feature Discount (2015), the film is set in a dismal northern French town (the kind where you expect social deprivation to be painfully apparent in every street) and tells a similar tale of individuals banding together to counter a social injustice.  In Petit's earlier film, an enterprising cohort of supermarket employees open their own discount store after being dismissed and replaced by self-service checkout machines.  In Les Invisibles, a similarly motivated group of social workers create their own homeless drop-in centre after the town's official centre is closed down after being judged inefficient by the local social services executives.

The group of compulsive do-gooders consists of four women who, whilst united by their intention to right a social wrong, could scarcely be more different, ranging from the absurdly quixotic to the ballsy pragmatic.  They are portrayed with arresting conviction by four supremely talented actresses - Audrey Lamy, Corinne Masiero, Noémie Lvovsky and Déborah Lukumuena.  Masiero's no-nonsense Manu reminds us of the thick-skinned and resourceful character she played so memorably in Cyril Mennegun's 2012 film Louise Wimmer, coincidentally a homeless women determined not to be beaten by life's injustices.  The youngest and liveliest member of the quartet, Déborah Lukumuena follows her astonishing turn in Houda Benyamina's Divines (2016) with another searingly authentic streetwise character portrayal.

Impressive as the four leads are, they are all too easily eclipsed by the real stars of the film - the ensemble of non-professionals that Petit astutely chose to portray the homeless women, the 'Invisibles' of the film's title.  A more colourful and engaging bunch of individuals you can scarcely imagine, and whilst they have all been visibly scarred by their own brutal experiences of homelessness, there is no sign that they have been beaten into submission by hardship and misfortune.  Au contraire, they exhibit an extraordinary zest for life and are as likely to make us laugh with the irreverent musings and unladylike behaviour as make us weep at the calamities they have endured at the hands of an unfeeling and often downright cruel social system.  Adolpha Van Meerhaeghe's husband slaying Chantal and Marianne Garcia's fantasist Lady Di steal more than a few scenes and do more to involve us in the plight of women in their situation than any number of straight-talking documentaries.

Where the film is less successful is in weaving a fictional narrative around the true-life experiences of real homeless women.  Regardless of how good the four lead actresses are, we know from the outset that whatever personal problems their characters have pale into insignificance compared with those of the women whom they are committed to helping.  By dividing the focus in this way, Petit gives his film a split identity that weakens its impact greatly.  The fragmented result feels somewhat aimless and incoherent, further marred by a forced happy ending that just fails to convince.

Les Invisibles is at its most powerful and emotionally involving when it allows representatives of the homeless community to take centre stage and hold us in rapt attention as their life experiences flood into our consciousness, making us laugh and weep in equal measure.  The film may not have the sustained brilliance of a comparable Ken Loach social drama but it is a worthy attempt to increase public awareness of the most despicable social failing of our time, doing so with a pleasing abundance of warmth, compassion and good humour.

Film Synopsis

Audrey, Manu, Hélène and Angélique are committed employees at a drop-in centre for homeless women in a town in Northern France.  Unemployment and social deprivation are rife in the area, so the work that Audrey and her colleagues undertake provides an essential lifeline to many women of all ages who have fallen on hard times.  The team of dedicated social workers are flabbergasted when the town's authorities judge the centre to be ineffective and decide to close it down.

Realising how valuable a service they are providing to the local community, Audrey and her friends resort to civil disobedience and immediately open their own substitute centre, on the premises of an unused workshop.  The new centre, operating without authorisation, proves to be a success, and whilst the staff running it all have their own personal problems to contend with, they find plenty to concern them as homeless women in varying states of distress descend on them, desperate for help...