Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2025

[Chris Knipp]

THIBAUD DE LONGEVILE: DJ MEHDI, MADE IN FRANCE (mini-series)

TRAILER

Carrière ouverte aux talents (career open to talents)

In the late nineties the Parisian "banlieure," the suburban ghettos, begah to produce prodigies, very young men of color inspired by the new genre of rap to become artists at the ages of twelve or thirteen, an energy that was to change the face of music nationwide. Foremost among them was the boy of North African Arab parents, Mehdi Faveris-Essadi, who was to become known as DJ Mehdi. Self-taught composer, turntable prodigy, and visionary producer, he began producing fully formed raps at home using the records they had, including disco and Umm Kulsoum, improvising a mixer by bricolage, and was to grow into a mult-talented maker and producer of virtual Quincy Jones proportions, though he was to die in 2011 at only thirty-four when the skylight (or mezzanine) of his Paris home collapsed.

There is a new documentary about his complex life in six episodes as "DJ Mehdi: Made in France," which is now availabler for streamng in certain countries via the Arte label. It has been generously included in the Lincoln Center 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. The miniseries provides an insight into a multicultural - and totally French - outgoowth of rap, which at its outset French white media pundits declared destined to fade quickly. They were very mistaken.

Popular music such as hip-hop and techno came in to fill a need that they in turn created. This passionate documentary begins with astonishing talent that seems to bloom in unfertile soil. His family came from Tunis in the sixties. They all changed from their Muslim names to French ones. Those who describe their encounterr with DJ Mahdi wonder what could have happened from age eight to age twelve to develop him into a hip hop composer for rappers. How did he encounter rappers and go on to make things that were to become legendary ("culte")? A mystery that is the heart of this series' first episode.

All along the way, and what may give the series its wider interest, we keep hearing about how the mainstream producders and media people rejected the young prodigies, told them they didn't matter, that their genre would not last. We see from much arthival footage that Mehdi glowed with an upbeat spirit and a warmth and beauty that made him appealing. He was also, with that, a visionary. This first episode I saw is just a teaser, but it has heart and excitement and promise of mysteries to unravel. The series tells a larger story about how rap broke out of the banlieue to reshape the national cultural landscape, which spread to the UK, as is shown by the Guardian obiuary.

DJ Mehdi: Made in France, six-part mini-series from Arte directed by Thibaud de Longueville, released Sept 12, 2024 in France on the internet. Screened for this review as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, where the four-hour series will be shown. Showing:

Sunday, March 9
6:00 PM Q&A with Thibaut de Longeville on March 9

The runtime includes a 15 minute intermission.


DJ MEHDI

[Chris Knipp]

ROSCHDY ZEM, BELLA KIM

KOYA KAMURA: WINTER IN SOKCHO/HIVER À SOKCHO (2024)

Fish, faces, and foreigners

This French-Korean collaborative film is a pensive, minimalist feature debut set at a dead-end outpost of the northeast Korean tourist hub of Sokcho, out of season. Based on a novel by Swiss writer Elisa Shua Dusapin’s described as "broodingly atmospheric," it focuses on an encounter of two people, Soo-ha (newcomer Bella Kim), a young Korean woman whose French father disappeared before she was born, and a famous French comic book artist who comes here in search of inspiraton. Called Yan Kerrand (Moroccan-descent French star Roschdy Zem), he arrives alone and unnancounced to stay at the rustic lodge where Soon-ha works as the live-in cook and receptionist. She being the only one around who speaks French, which she's studied, she is set to help Kerrand out with anything he needs.

The rough-hewn Frenchman, who's very direct and none too polite, is a big contrast to Soon-ha's vacuous model boyfriend Joon-oh (Gong Do-yu), who thinks only of modeling jobs, haircuts and cosmetic surgery and is prettier than she is.

Soon-ha likes Mr. Park (Ryu Tae-ho), owner of the inn she works for, who's almost like family and a recent widower so he needs her. She is also together weekly with her mom (Park Mi-hyeon), who runs a fish stall in town and prepares the deadly fugu pufferfish and octopus. Soo-ha likes being with her mother, who turns out to be ailing, and would not leave her to go and live in Seoul with her boyfriend, as he wants now that he's gotten a good modeling job. But that is not the reason: she's just not interested in the pretty boy anymore. By then she has been spending time taking Kerrand around to gather atmosphere for his next comic book and that contact has "changed her ideas," as the French say. Not that there is romance. She has thought more about her lost father.

The film also likes drawings. We are asked to admire those of the comic book artist, which look nice and are complimented by Soo-ha, who looks him up on the internet; and there are hand drawn animations by Agnès Patron showng women and bodies, which seem to emphasize body shame or pregnancy, changing shapes, which sometimes seem ripped off from Edvard Munch's The Scream. They may represent something in the book not quite so well expressed in the film format, a vidual counterpoint of longing or anguish. Paul Enicola in a review of the film in The Asian Cut says they "symbolise [Soo-ha's] body dysmorphia, fear of attachment, and her longing to break free from the shackles of stunted relationships." Fair enough; but it's a bit tacked-on and diagrammatic, like the swirling violins in the score. The central feeling is of emptiness, with a world of colorful local atmosphere and connections that pull Soo-ha but can't satisfy her.

I have not read the source book, whose author too is Swiss Korean, and can go only by the Guardian review, which says it is made up of "terse sentences that are sometimes staggeringlhy beautiful" and concludes (admiringly, it would seem) that it is a "noirish cold sweat of a book." Perhaps only the trappings remain, as with Jane Austen, based on whom pretty, entertaining movies are made from which some of the distinctive verbal style and supple moral intelligence have always slipped away.

We get a quick tour of the DMZ to which Soo-ha drives Kerrand (he has no international driving license)- tricky to film since cameras are basically not allowed except in the museum. She also takes him to a busy restaurant in town.

The film is interested in fish, faces, and foreigners. Faces because Soo-ha is a sort of beauty in the rough. She wears homely glasses. Her boyfriend talks about facial surgery for her, and she traces the fine bone structure of his face while he's asleep. There is Roschdy Zem's gnarly, wrinkled face. Soo-ha's mom was beautiful in her youth, and so, "of course," was the Frenchman, she tells Soo-ha. (Underlining the emphasis on looks, a wordless character in the film is a woman recovering from full facial plastic surgery.) We're always seeing octopi and the puffer fish being cleaned and prepred and eaten: the town is awash in fish. The two Frenchmen, the present one and the long-gone one, are by implication in every scene even if only by their absence.

They cannot satisfy Soo-ha and she can't satisfy them. Kerrand uses her for his artistic tourism but keeps her at arm's length and outright cuts her off once he starts working intensively on his new Sokcho graphic novel. (There are clichés of the brooding artist here.) Her father is lost, and rejected fatherhood. The violins swirl expressing the young woman's emptiness and need. Enicola says the film treatment has the effect of makng "the alredy vague novel even more ambiguous." Which just goes to show, dealing with tales of lost or missing parents and mixed origins is a tricky business.

This is an atmospheric mood piece, but lacks the intensity and romantic swirl of a present tense cross-cultural encounter, a most heightened version being of course Alain Renais' classic, perhaps in its way also clichéd Hiroshima mon amour. Perhaps here both the book and the film have more a mood to express than a story to tell.

Koya Kamura is Asian-French himself, a a French-Japanese director born in Paris and graduated from Film University at Paris VII who also studied at Keio University in Tokyo, in 2007 worked in France at VIACOM group (MTV, GameOne) in 2007, and the next year joined the Walt Disney Company as a creative producer and director.

Winter in Sokcho/Hiver à Sokcho, 94 mins., debuted at Toronto Sept. 6, 2024, showing also at San Sebastián, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and Tokyo FILMeX. It was screened for this review as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous With French Ciname at lincoln Center. Showtimes
Tuesday, March 11 3:30 PM Wednesday, March 12 9:00 PM