This Is Our Land
Jérôme Leroy and Lucas Belvaux, 2017
#72, 2018 Skandies

I am far from an expert on French politics, but I think I have at least a vague grasp of the broad outlines.  Voting for the presi­dency takes place over two rounds.  A dozen or more parties might attract non-negligible support in the first round, but for most of my lifetime the same two parties would proceed to the final runoff: the Socialists and a mainstream conservative party that seemed to pop up with a different name  each election, most recently “the Republicans”.  Then in 2002 came a shock: in the first round, Lionel Jospin’s Socialists were narrowly edged out in the first round by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right nativist party, the National Front.  At the time, this could perhaps have been dismissed as a quirk of France’s system.  Le Pen secured only 16.9% of the vote in the first round, but with fifteen different candidates receiving at least one percent, that was good enough for second place.  In the runoff he improved barely at all, climb­ing to 17.8%.  Meanwhile, incumbent president Jacques Chirac jumped from 19.9% to a preposterous 82.2%.  The National Front looked like it had hit its ceiling.  But cut to fifteen years later.  Incumbent president François Hollande, a Socialist, was pro­foundly unpopular; his presumed opponent, François Fillon of the Republicans, was embroiled in scandal.  Meanwhile, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter Marine had taken over the National Front in 2011 and had spent the subsequent time softening its image, disentangling itself at least outwardly from its most reactionary positions and its fascist or at least fascist-adjacent associations.  She had the National Front (which she would soon rename the National Rally) poised to take power if mainstream voters could not find a mainstream candidate to boost into the second round.  They did⁠—technocrat Emmanuel Macron, who won the runoff with 66.1% of the vote.  But this film was made before that vote took place.

It’s about Pauline Duhez, a visiting nurse in 11th constituency of the Pas-de-Calais department in far northern France, near the Belgian border; since 2017, that district has been represented in the National Assembly by none other than Marine Le Pen.  Pau­line is so disengaged from politics that she’s never even voted, but one of the doctors she works with thinks she would make a great candidate for mayor: a devoted single mom, respected in the community for her dedication to her disadvantaged patients, might attract votes that no political hack ever could.  This doctor turns out to be a key operative for a very thinly disguised Na­tional Front, the People’s National Rally, which he describes to her as a party neither of the left nor right, but offering common­sense solutions to local problems that the old guard of politicians doesn’t talk about.  Soon he has her campaigning with a very thinly disguised Marine Le Pen⁠—which means standing and smiling while Le Pen gives a fiery speech, since Pauline doesn’t even know the details of the National Front’s platform, and her campaign advisors assure her that she doesn’t need to know.  Some of her friends are appalled that she would even vote for the National Front, let alone run on its ticket; others are delighted to discover that Pauline apparently shares the views they’ve been afraid to admit to in polite soci­ety.  Her father disowns her.  Her Muslim patients tell her to stay away.  Her new boyfriend tells her to stay away for a different reason: back in his skinhead days, he bashed in heads and blew up cars as a member of the party’s paramilitary wing, and now the party operatives have told him to break it off with Pauline if he doesn’t want to find himself with a belated jail sentence after evidence of his crimes mysteriously comes to light.  They’re trying to convince the public they’ve changed, and can’t have their candidates linked to neo-Nazis.

The title chosen for this movie in English-speaking countries was This Is Our Land, but while I am also very far from an expert on the French language, my understanding is that this doesn’t quite capture the meaning of the French title, Chez Nous.  To me, “this is our land” suggests merely a claim to ownership of an object (the sticky note on a paper bag in the office refrigerator reading “This is my sandwich⁠—hands off!”) or more specifically a terri­tory (sitting patiently in a parking lot with your blinker on, sig­naling to all that “This is my parking spot!”).  But the title is ac­tually drawn from a slogan the crowd chants at a National Front rally: « On est chez nous », meaning “We’re at home”⁠—that is, not only is this a place where we feel safe and comfortable, which we’ve made in our own image and tailored to suit all our little quirks, but we’re already here, cozily settled in.  Which rais­es the question: who exactly is the « nous » here, the “we”?  Is it anyone who happens to reside within the borders of France?  Is it citizens?  Is it people who, at least in broad strokes, participate in French culture?  Pauline seems inclined toward this view; when the teenage daughter of one of her Muslim patients, a girl Pauline had once ferried to ballet practice while her mother was sick, expresses her anger at the National Front’s proposed “papers, please” policy, Pauline doesn’t understand: your mother has her papers, she says, and you’re French!  This girl grew up in France, doesn’t wear a headscarf, speaks without an Arabic ac­cent… why would anyone see her as an outsider?  But one answer has already come up, at a lunch gathering earlier in the film.  France, like its fellow European nations, is an ethnostate.  When the crowd at the National Front rally sings the French national anthem, they’re calling upon their fellow citizens to take up arms and water the fields with the “impure blood” of those who would dare invade the Fatherland.  But whose blood is sufficiently “pure” for the National Front?  Some supporters at the lunch gathering grumble that the Arabs living at a housing project Pauline visits simply aren’t as French as the guests sitting around the table⁠—leading one of the guests to ask whether she doesn’t qualify either, as her family immigrated from Yugoslavia in the 1950s.  Look at the presidents of France!  Emmanuel Macron has some English ancestry.  His predecessor François Hollande, as his surname suggests, has Dutch roots.  His prede­cessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, has a Hungarian surname.  Pauline’s surname, Duhez, could in one sense hardly be more tied to where she lives⁠—it means “from the ford of Pas-de-Calais”⁠—but it means that in Walloon, not French.  And then there’s the ex-skinhead boyfriend, who still practices hand-to-hand combat in a sweaty gym festooned with panoramic posters of Joan of Arc leading French battalions.  He tells Pauline that he backs the movie’s version of the National Front because “I vote for my values. My country.”  He chides the doctor for not driving a French car.  And yet what paramilitary group is he currently affiliated with?  Flemish Soli­darity, with its gigantic flag reading “Mijn volk, mijn land”!  That ain’t French, and the chief goal of Flemish separatism is to detach Flanders from French-speaking Wallonia.  So which is “my country” again?  Perhaps his surname could provide a clue.  And this fierce French and/or Flemish patriot’s surname turns out to be… Stankowiak.  Our “France for the French and/or Flemish” neo-Nazi, who spends his nights beating up those with “impure blood”, is ethnically what the paleo-Nazis would have considered a Slavic Untermensch.  I thought this was well observed.  As the kids say, it not only do be like that sometimes, it seems that it do be like that more often than not.  (Perhaps the kids don’t say it precisely that way.)

Mark Perez, John Francis Daley, and Jonathan Goldstein, 2018
#38, 2018 Skandies

This one’s a comedy thriller, drawing on the old trope that “everyone thinks that the danger all around them is just a per­formance, but actually it’s real”.  It’s no classic, but it’s pretty fun.  I’ll limit myself to two comments:

• A thing I didn’t like:  I’ve noted in past articles that in way too many comedies, the main joke is, “Ha ha, aren’t these people awful?”  And often the answer is, yes, and it makes being around these people so unpleasant that no jokes can make up for it.  There’s a character named Brooks in this movie who is such an asshole that any thought of having a good time while he was on screen went out the window⁠—I didn’t care about jokes, but only about seeing this cretin get his comeuppance.  Thankfully, he does!  Not enough of one, but at least he experiences some consequences for what he has chosen to be.  That is not always the case in these sorts of stories.

• A thing I did like:  On the flip side, the lead characters are a married couple, and… there is no serious conflict between them.  They get along well, enjoy each other’s company, have each other’s back in good times and bad.  It was a pleasant change of pace not to have the central couple working through problems that had them on the verge of splitting up.  They don’t even bicker.  Occasional differences of opinion, sure, but expressed with affection.  Since these characters are presented to us as ultra-competitive people, it seems like the natural choice would be to have them constantly competing with one another, so it’s a credit to the filmmakers that they steered clear of that trap and made the central couple fun to be around.

Jeff VanderMeer and Alex Garland, 2018
#34, 2018 Skandies

An excerpt from my favorite poem, by Don Marquis:

he felt the beginnings
of a gradual change
invading him
some new and disintegrating
influence
was stealing along him
from his positive
to his negative pole
and he did not have
the mental stamina
of a jonah to resist the
insidious
process of assimilation
which comes like a thief
in the night

This is more or less what we have here.  Something from the far reaches of the galaxy plows into the Earth, creating a bubble of warped space into which reconnaissance teams have been sent and never heard from again.  Now, a member of one of these teams has finally returned, but in terrible shape⁠—multiple organ failure.  We follow another team that heads into “the Shimmer” to see whether they can find any answers.  Inside, it turns out that everything is being scrambled⁠—light waves, radio transmis­sions… and DNA, somehow changing living creatures on the fly.  At first this looks innocuous: different species of flowers growing from the same stem.  When the flowers start growing from the antlers of deer, it’s quite pretty, but less innocuous.  And when they start growing from the team physicist’s arms, well, that’s something else altogether.  “When I look at my hands, and my fingerprints… I can see them moving,” the team medic weeps.  That she would be horrified makes perfect sense.  Yes, we’re constantly changing in real life as well.  As the old saw has it, a completely different set of atoms may make up our bodies today from those that made up our bodies a few years ago.  But that seems academic⁠—we tend not to identify with our atoms.  The overall picture that they combine to form, sure: imprint on the face you see in the mirror at age 18, and you might well be startled at the face you see at age 81.  What’s really unnerving, though, is that the things we use to define ourselves⁠—passions in life, key relationships, core beliefs⁠—are always in flux.  Yet we tend to cling to the idea of an integral self, and to lose that might well feel like the deepest possible violation.

Unfortunately, for all its intriguing weirdness, the bulk of Annihilation is the most primal of narratives: small band of humans venture out, weapons in hand, and try to avoid getting killed by wild beasts, usually failing.  The cerebral sci-fi is just a gloss on “Aieee! Bears will eat you!”  Let me put it this way.  One of the most memorable moments in Annihilation comes when the team happens upon some plants that have taken the shape of people.  Hedges trimmed into a human shape?  People trans­formed into plants?  Then the physicist hits upon the answer: no, they are plants, but they’ve had human Hox DNA swapped into them and thereby adopted a human body plan.  Annihilation may be full of striking images and cool ideas, but its body plan is that of a big dumb monster movie.

	comment on Tumblr	reply via email	support this site	return to the Calendar page