Divines (2016)
Directed by Houda Benyamina

Film Review

Houda Benyamina received the Golden Camera (awarded for the year's best first film) at Cannes in 2016 for her first feature Divines.  It is an auspicious debut for the director although, having watched the film, you can't help wondering if it really deserves the award or the praise that was heaped on it by critics inexplicably in thrall to the wave of bad-ass youth feminism that has hit cinema in recent years.  It all began two years ago with Céline Sciamma's Bande de filles (2014), a shocking depiction of adolescent rebellion (shocking because the rebellious protagonists are all female).  Benyamina's film is little more than a brazen imitation of Sciamma's overrated contribution to the now crowded 'film de banlieue' genre, fierce and feisty but somewhat lacking in substance and too obviously clinging to a band wagon that is joyriding its way through French cinema at the moment.

Divines offers one Hell of a joyride but its energy and in-you-face aggression do not conceal the fact that it is painfully derivative.  Not content with copying Sciamma's film, it rapidly degenerates into a thriller of the most formulaic kind, making as much of a spectacle as it can as it works its way through all of the familiar genre clichés.  Benyamina has been praised for her breezy direction, but she has a job holding together a jerky narrative that in the end fails to achieve any degree of coherence.  In fact the film would be pretty hard to take seriously were it for the strong performances from its lead performers, in particular Oulaya Amamra, who is assuredly one of the French film revelations of the year.  Amamra's gutsy portrayal of an adolescent fighting back against a system that favours only the strong, the fortunate and the wicked is one that stays with you, long after the film has slipped from your memory.

Film Synopsis

Dounia lives with her alcoholic mother in an urban ghetto on the outskirts of Paris, a place where drugs and religion are the only means of escape from a life of unremitting boredom and misery.  Dounia sees another way out - by getting rich as quickly as she can.  Shoplifting doesn't earn her enough so she decides to try her hand at peddling drugs.  With the help of her best friend Maimouna, she makes contact with Rebecca, a dealer she feels she can trust.  Dounia's life of crime is about to take off with a vengeance when she has an unexpected and significant encounter with an alluring young dancer named Djigui...