Shéhérazade (2018)
Directed by Jean-Bernard Marlin

Film Review

In 2018, director Jean-Bernard Marlin met with almost universal critical acclaim for his first feature, Shéhérazade, a hyper-realistic boy-meets-girl drama located in one of the roughest and toughest districts of France - the northern suburbs of Marseille.  Prior to this, Marlin made two short films - La Peau dure (2007) and La Fugue (2012) - but with his debut feature the 38-year old filmmaker made such an impact that he is now widely tipped to become one of the most important French auteurs of his generation.  Shéhérazade not only received the coveted Jean-Vigo feature prize in 2018 (shared with Yann Gonzalez's Un couteau dans le coeur), it also won three Césars against stiff competition in 2019  - for Best First Film, Most Promising Actor and Most Promising Actresss.

With its savagely raw cinéma vérité realism and uncompromising brutality, Shéhérazade serves up a slice of gritty urban life that most of us will find pretty unpalatable to watch.  With astonishing vividness it conveys the seething rage of a generation - youngsters, scarcely out of childhood, living on the extreme margins of society - that has been totally neglected and is left to its own devices, to be caught in a precarious life of drugs peddling, teen prostitution and vicious gang warfare.  It may be set in the same city but the vision that Marlin presents is worlds away from that offered by Robert Guédiguian in his Marseille-based realist dramas.

A grim indictment of our times the film may be, but it is also one that resonates with hope.  In this modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet, its two central protagonists - a juvenile delinquent and a teen prostitute - both find a way out of their sordid life of crime and self-harm, redeemed and re-energised by the power of love.  It takes a filmmaker of rare talent to convincingly combine elements as diverse as teen romance, urban thriller and social realism, but Marlin and his co-screenwriter Catherine Paillé manage to pull off this remarkable feat with unimaginable deftness.  There is an underlying sensitivity and warmth to this singular film that is constantly belied by the sheer knife-edge brutality of the world that its protagonists inhabit.

Marlin's ambition was to make the film as realistic as possible, and in this he is ably served by his cast of entirely non-professional actors, including the lead performers Dylan Robert and Kenza Fortas.  It is not hard to see why the latter both won Césars for their work on this, their first acting job.  Both bring a gut-wrenching sense of reality to their arresting portrayals of characters whose life experiences are not so far removed from their own.  The world that Zac and Shéhérazade inhabit is one that is scarcely imaginable in a supposedly civilised society, one where teenagers are exposed to the worst vices known to man and every day is a gruelling act of survival against the odds.  With the help of his two accomplished lead actors, Jean-Bernard Marlin opens our eyes to a whole new universe of human degradation and resilience, but he also stirs our hearts with a simple tale of love that resonates with truth and poignancy.

Film Synopsis

Zachary is a 17-year-old delinquent living in one of the roughest neighbourhoods of north Marseille.  His petty criminal exploits have earned him a spell in a juvenile detention centre, but on leaving the centre he finds he has no home to return to.  His mother will have nothing more to do with him, and he refuses to be placed with a foster family, so he decides to go on the run and fend for himself.

One day, a dispirited Zac has a chance encounter with the attractive Shéhérazade, a girl of his own age who belongs to a gang of teenage prostitutes.  When his old friends turn their back on him, Zac moves in with Shéhérazade, sharing her cramped apartment and acting as her minder as she attends to her paying customers.  Before he knows it, Zac is a fully fledged pimp, and this presents some serious problems for him when he realises that he has fallen in love for the first time in his turbulent life...