Hardcore and Parkour

#12: Banlieue 13 (District B13)
This French action film depicts a dystopian future (2010!) where the Parisian suburbs have become so ungovernable that the French authorities elect to wall off the districts and eliminate all public services including the police and schools. Left without any civil authority, these districts devolve into semi-autonomous regions governed by drug lords and their hired thugs. The hero of the film, Lieto, is a resident of the district who seems at once to be one of the leaders of the community, which in this context means that he seems to have some armed staff, and a kind of a civic avenger, trying to impose some order on an otherwise wholly disorderly world.

The plot of the film is wholly predictable. The avenging hero ends up involuntarily paired with the lone-wolf undercover detective attempting to clean up the city, rescue Lieto's sister from the Scarface-channeling drug kingpin, and stop the bad guys from deploying a hijacked nuclear weapon against the still-civilized parts of Paris. But, in good dystopian form, it turns out that the real bad guys are employed by the government itself, which has decided to wipe out the population of B13 because it has "run out of ideas" about how to bring it back under control.

Don't go to this film for the plot. The remarkable parts of this movie are the action sequences. The stunts are ostensibly performed live, by the actors themselves, with no CGI interventions. And they are amazing. This film is said to exemplify the French discipline parkour, a kind of urban running that focuses on the synergistic potential of human movement and the physical environment. So walls exist to be bounced off of, scaled or walked up; speeding cars to be climbed, deflected, and jumped; and tables to be scaled, stood on, and used as leverage. It looks really cool. If you are particularly sensitive to the jerks, jumps, and color inconsistencies of even high quality CGI and green screen action then this movie will be a breath of fresh air. More than anything, the action sequences remind me of old Jackie Chan action movies from his pre-Hollywood Hong Kong days. When these guys jump a car, they actually jump the freakin' car. Cool. Plus the soundtrack has an understated techno vibe that lends the action a kind of balletic grace. It doesn't amp up the action so much as it abstracts away from the action to the acts themselves.

The film was originally released in 2004. Its sequel is being screened at Starz this month.

My favorite moment in the film: While the protagonists are figuring out that the bomb was actually placed in B13 by the French authorities to wipe out the impoverished (and notably darkish) people imprisoned behind the nearly impenetrable walls of their suburban ghetto , Lieto calculates that even the timing of the appearance of the bomb is suspicious. It turns up in B13 on September 7, just in time to catch everyone back in the city from their summer holiday. Apparently even after the meltdown of civil society Parisians will still get their statutory minimum of 30 days holiday. And all of them will take it in August.