“They are thugs, scum, I persist and I sign […] Young man? Sir? We call him a thug because he is a thug […] I call them ‘scum’ because they have chosen the name for themselves. Stop calling them youths.”
— Nicolas Sarkozy
“….These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
— Donald J. Trump
It begins with a sonogram. At first, we as the audience are disoriented by the confusing blends of grainy black, white, and grey colors as they move formless across the screen. We do not understand what we are looking at. Suddenly, a spine emerges from the jumble, followed by a heart. The heart begins to beat. We see a hand, and the image of a baby is revealed to us. From the pieces, we are able to create a whole image. “My name is Yasmine. I am three months pregnant,” the monologue starts. “One day, somebody said all people are born free and equal. The world I live in is the exact opposite. Who would want to be born into chaos and hatred? I decided to spare my baby the worst.” We are then shown the world that Yasmine lives in, and it is shockingly familiar.
The world that director Xavier Gens paints for the audience in the opening moments of Frontière(s) is not fictional. It shows the reality of France under the increased police presence, zero-tolerance policies, and Islamophobic immigration rhetoric brought about by far-right-leaning Nicolas Sarkozy — then-Interior Minister, later president of France. Sarkozy — leader of the center-right Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP) party, which held an absolute majority in the National Assembly from 2002 until 2012 — rose from Interior Minister to the presidency, emboldened by the wave of rightist politics that were reinvigorated by the 2002 presidential election. In 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of Front national (FN) — a far-right political party built on anti-immigration, zero tolerance, and law-and-order rhetoric — reached the second round of voting in the French presidential election. (Notably, polls had failed to predict Le Pen’s placement in the second round, much as the 2016 US election had failed to accurately predict Donald J. Trump’s victory in key swing-states over Hillary Clinton.) “[Le Pen’s success] was the most fear I ever felt in my life,” Gens recalls, “I wanted to translate that fear into Frontière(s).” Le Pen, however, did not see the French presidency. As Gens describes it, “the French knew the danger [Le Pen] represents, and everybody voted against him because when you see a representative on the extreme right making it to the second round of the presidential election, that’s really frightening for everybody. You cannot accept that as truth.” (Support for Le Pen’s opponent, Jacques Chirac — who was under suspicion for corruption while serving as mayor of Paris — became vocalised through the slogan “vote for the crook, not the fascist.” This calls to mind “Crooked Hillary” rhetoric that was prevalent in the 2016 US presidential election.) While the presidency of Le Pen — around whose rhetoric and ideology the film was inspired — was not actualised in 2002 due to a heavy voter turnout from leftists, in May 2007 — two months before Frontière(s) premiered at the Agde Film Festival — Sarkozy was elected president. Sarkozy’s successful election in the face of Le Pen’s failure altered the viewing experience for French audiences, shifting the reality of the film away from a speculation of Le Pen’s France towards the reality of Sarkozy’s.
Audiences coming to Frontière(s) with the intent of using it as an escape from current neo-fascist reality will likely not find comfort in this film. The rise of neo-fascism in France serves not only as inspiration for the film’s creation, but also motivates the plot of the film. There exists a certain parallelism between France at the time of Frontière(s) and the current political condition of the United States. Frontière(s)’s inseparability from reality rules the film out as being a potential positive subject, as it makes escapism impossible. Rather, it forces the viewer to reckon with the fact that the near past is equally as abysmal as the present.
Frontière(s)’s opening sequence presents a staunch documentary of the 2005 riots in the French suburbs, during which Frontière(s)’s otherwise fictional narrative is set. On 27 October 2005, two youths — Bouna Traoré (15 years) and Zyed Benna (17 years) — were electrocuted to death while taking shelter in an electrical substation. They were hiding from a racial profiling-motivated arrest in which national police attempted to arrest six African youths who were in proximity to an attempted robbery. A trial which was held in March 2015 would yield no conviction for the officers involved. During the riots — which would result in the arrests of over 2,760 individuals over the course of three weeks — Sarkozy declared a zero-tolerance policy and labelled the rioters as “scum” and “thugs.” Despite the majority of protestors being French citizens, Sarkozy — with the vocal support of Le Pen — “asked the prefects to deport [foreigners] from our national territory without delay, including those who have a residency visa.” Le Pen and other right-wing politicians saw these riots as vindication for their anti-immigration policies (members of the US Republican Party and Fox News drew connections between Al-Qaeda — the Islamic terrorist group — and the rioters, stoking further Islamaphobic discrimination in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The French intelligence agency Renseignements Généraux (RG) has indicated that there is no evidence of extremist Islamic influence in the riots.)
The documentary footage Frontière(s) uses of the 2005 riots begins with mass marches in the streets during the day. The square in front of the Place de la Bastille — a historically significant French Revolution site — is flooded with people, packed so tightly they stand on the base of the July Column and overflow into the streets. Tensions rise during the night. Protestors sit on the ground of the street with their hands up. One makes a peace sign with both hands as the camera zooms out to reveal a line of over a dozen riot-geared officers prepared for confrontation (during the 2007 presidential election — which Sarkozy would win — Sarkozy is called a “candidate for brutality” by opponent Ségolène Royal). The audio from the sonogram moments before is recalled — the beating of the baby’s heart is perversely altered into the sound of militaristic marching as the police advance to rapidly escalate violence. The sound of a reporter saying “extreme right-wing government” is heard as it is revealed to the audiences that a ring-wing candidate has reached the second round of the presidential election (Le Pen is not mentioned specifically by name, but rather — later in the film — the presidential candidate is revealed to be the current Interior Minister — again, nameless. Sarkozy held the position of Interior Minister at the time. It was known during the 2005 riots that Sarkozy was a likely presidential contender for the 2007 elections). Protestors fight back against the police. Gunshots go off. Fires burn in the streets. Hoses are used to push protestors back (“we will clean the area with a pressure washer,” Sarkozy had remarked of a majority immigrant-populated suburb in 2005). The audio goes silent and then reflectively solemn as the footage focuses on instance after instance of police brutality during arrests. Music then begins and swells as the violence continues on into the next day, with police continuing to clash with protestors in the daylight.
The main action of Frontière(s) begins in that moment, with the documentary footage seamlessly transitioning to a reenactment of a burning Paris working-class suburb during the protests. Taking advantage of the chaos of the moment, Muslim youths Alex (Aurélien Wiik), Farid (Chems Dahmani), Sami (Adel Bencherif), and Tom (David Saracino) pull off a robbery. They intend to use the money to take each other and Sami’s pregnant sister, Yasmine (Karina Testa) — whose sonographic images and monologue open the film — out of France and into the Netherlands. They intend to escape from the rising Islamophobia that Le Pen’s run for the presidency and Sarkozy’s hateful rhetoric and targeted shock policing has invigorated. “Fascist country,” Tom remarks to Farid. “I told you that France was ten years behind the United States. Here it comes — finally we have our George Bush.” As the group move towards the border, they take refuge in a family-run inn. The family’s patriarch — a former Nazi officer still dedicated to the extremist ideology — von Geisler (Jean-Pierre Jorris), sees to the violent destruction of everyone in the group, save for Yasmine. Yasmine is successful in fighting her way to survival. However, as she escapes to freedom in the family’s stolen car, news comes over the radio: the far-right candidate has won the French presidency. With the border in sight, Yasmine — drenched in Nazi blood — is stopped by a police blockade. She is seen raising her hands in surrender. The film ends.
The ending of Frontière(s) — which was once considered to be speculative, with the far-right candidate winning the presidency — became reality before the film’s release with Sarkozy’s election to the presidency. Alexandra West — author of Films of the New French Extremity — observes that, “[i]n the film’s closing moments, when Yasmine, covered in blood, surrenders to the police, Gens does not reveal whether the world is indeed a safe place for the young Muslim woman and her unborn child.” But Gens does not have to reveal this. Even if the ending of the film was to play out according to the most optimistic conclusion — with Yasmine somehow subverting the police and making it into the Netherlands — even a socially tolerant country such as the Netherlands has proven to not be immune to rightist influence. In the Netherlands, the same ideology Yasmine attempts to escape is pushed by self-described “right-wing liberal” Geert Wilders and his Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) — which he formed in 2006. They seek to stop the “Islamisation of the Netherlands.” In 2014, Wilders successfully formed — alongside Le Pen, the FN, and rightist parties from several other countries — a far-right parliamentary group in the European Parliament intent on defending national identity and national borders — Europe des nations et des liberté (ENL). Yasmine cannot escape the fascist reality no matter where she goes in the West, and therefore neither can the audience, who is meant to understand her as their surrogate.
In a historic ruling on March 1, 2021, Sarkozy became the first French president to be sentenced to prison. His sentence — a three year sentence with two years suspended — will be served under house arrest. Sarkozy had bribed a judge in return for information regarding an investigation into campaign finance violations linked to his incumbent run in the 2012 election. Sarkozy lost this election by a 3.2% margin, ultimately serving only one term in office. While Sarkozy’s sentence is light, it is still a sentence — a resolution for the people of France that Sarkozy had terrorised with his policies, though many have not lived to see it. With the United States’s recent inability to convict Trump of insurrection in his second impeachment, and a new run for the presidency in 2024 being threatened, it may be difficult to look at the Sarkozy verdict as significant to understanding the current state of US neo-fascism. Ultimately, what we may glean from it is that the passage of time may allow for some form of accountability to be held. In the moment of his presidency and in the immediate aftermath, Trump might have been uncontactable, but that immunity may not last. The question then becomes one of how much damage can be done in the meantime? Even with Sarkozy’s verdict, neo-fascism has not yet fully dissipated in France. Le Pen was expelled from FN in 2015 after a series of controversial statements; Le Pen then simply created a new political party, Comités Jeanne. And if Trump were to be convicted and removed from political life, it would not miraculously remove the neo-fascists from the US either. Here, one might consider Frontière(s) once again: difficult to watch, but important to pay attention to. Frontière(s) might seem a harsh or extreme film — with the neo-fascists winning and there being no hope of escape for the protagonist — but there is merit in engaging with a hard-to-watch film. In the case of Frontière(s), it reveals a sense of shared national trauma linked to the recent neo-fascist rise. This sense of shared experience is one that can be looked to in a hopeful light. Trauma such as this is not experienced only on an individual scale — there exists common feelings of tragedy and injustice that span across borders and national boundaries, and Frontière(s) gives its viewers a glimpse of this deeply personalised shared experience.
