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Abstract
In the context of a shift in focus from banlieues to borders and national identity in French politics under Sarkozy, this article investigates the concurrent cinematic move to France's geographical and social periphery in L’Italien (2010). In this film set in Nice, Mourad the main character has to suppress his Algérianité and become “Dino the Italian” to secure a job promotion and the Frenchness his French passport should have already granted him. This article focuses on representations of the border as a site of encounter between the historical, républicain center of France and its geographical, ethnic periphery. An analysis of specific scenes reveals that L’Italien thematizes the border and constructs Mourad/Dino as a border crossing agent to question the ethnic and historical definitions of nationhood in contemporary France. More specifically, Baroux's use of France's outer geographical border exposes the internal fracture coloniale that divides modern France into its hexagonal present and its colonial past. Ultimately, through geographical and thematic liminality, L’Italien engages in a dialogue between immigration and national identity that aims to incorporate past and present immigration.
Notes
1 Translations are mine.
2 Borders were certainly on the mind of Front National followers during the campaign. In March 2011, just a year before Sarkozy's speech in Toulouse, party leader Marine Le Pen was already setting the tone of her campaign when she paid a brief, but highly mediatized visit to Italy's southernmost island of Lampedusa, where refugees from the “Arab Spring” unrests were arriving, and, according to her, bringing “disorder” to Europe. See Dahmani.
3 Released in 2010, the comedy is significantly set against the background of the 1993 abolition of border controls within the European Union. The story revolves around international and personal frictions at a Franco-Belgian border control point.
4 The decade separating the camps of Sangatte and Calais starts with the 1999 Red-Cross opening of an emergency camp for refugees in a building belonging to Eurotunnel, the company that operates the Channel tunnel between France and Great-Britain. Eurotunnel is fined for each illegal migrant attempting to cross the border and invests large amounts of money to secure its access: the 2002 French demolition of the overcrowded Sangatte camp, and the 2009 French police dismantling of the Calais “jungle,” an illegal camp set up following the closure of the Sangatte Red-Cross camp. For a presentation of the various issues facing migrants in Calais, including the tensions they created between France and Great Britain about the management of border postes de police; see Migreurop.org's 2009 annual report on human rights violations around borders (67).
5 The 2010 mass expulsions of Roma people were triggered by violence in the town of Saint-Aignan and its area (Loir-et-Cher). Following the police shooting and death of a young member of the travelling community who tried to force his way through a police check point, rioters attacked the local police station and shops. President Sarkozy's bellicose response to the violence was to declare “war” on “crime.” See Agence France Presse, “Violences: Sarkozy nomme un nouveau préfet et pointe les «problèmes» liés aux Roms.”
6 Human rights groups swiftly criticized President Sarkozy's inflammatory rhetoric on several counts. First, his statement stigmatized Roma people by associating them with “problems” (“problèmes que posent les comportements de certains parmi les gens du voyage et les Roms”). Such remarks justified expulsions since, under European law, the state can expel people who have been in the country for at least three months who are unemployed and constitute a social burden or who are deemed to be a threat to public security. Secondly, Luc Chatel (the government's spokesperson at the time) ethnicized the “issue” when he incorrectly collapsed Roma people (mainly from Romania and Bulgaria) and nomadic French nationals, legally referred to as les gens du voyage whose profession requires traveling and a permit to do so. For an article discussing President Sarkozy's language concerning Roma people, see Caro.
7 See Agence France Presse, “Nicolas Sarkozy continue de vilipender ‘racailles et voyous.’”
8 See Hargreaves, Immigration. For more on the rise of Le Pen in the 1970s-1990s, see Hargreaves' chapter entitled “The Ethnicization of Politics in France.”
9 The discours sécuritaire even led Le Pen to the runner-up position in the shockingly radicalized 2002 presidential elections. That year, the final round opposed Chirac and Le Pen, two hard right candidates, instead of two ideologically different candidates, from opposite sides of the political spectrum.
10 For literature on a variety of topics associated with banlieue , such as religion, gender roles, ethnicity, race and class, social mobility, and police repression, see the comprehensive list in Thomas.
11 For more on the problematic spatial and political association between immigration and urban environments, see Hargreaves, “No Escape?” and Higbee.
12 For an elaboration on Tarr's work, see Durmelat and Swamy.
13 Neither a blockbuster, nor a critically acclaimed film, L’Italien was somewhat a popular success, earning decent results at the box office with 1.1 million tickets sold in its first seven weeks. Also, while the review in Variety was quite severe, it may need to recognize that the film cleverly includes “cultural clichés and easy sentiments” as well as comedic situations that actually guarantee a wider audience for a message of tolerance about nationality and legitimacy in a Franco-Maghrebi context. Therefore, the dual classification of L’Italien as “dramedy” lends a generic hybridity to the film that allows it to present the issue of ethnicity and nationality in a comedic tone and to discuss its more serious implications with more dramatic overtones. And, while Baroux's longtime association in a comedic duo with Kad Merad (who plays Dino in L’Italien) may diminish the seriousness of his endeavor, it can also be perceived as an asset because of the personal familiarity with stories of discrimination in both Baroux's and Merad's experiences. Finally, Baroux brings to the film his personal and professional “border” experience: originally from Normandie, an outer region of western France, he played “Riper” in Éric Lartigau's 2003 Mais qui a tué Pamela Rose? The comedy explored the blurred perception of France's cultural reality, with a French cast mimicking American TV cop shows such as Twin Peaks and Starsky and Hutch, abundantly shown on French TV during the 1970s, during Merad's and Baroux's formative years. It can be argued that while in Pamela Rose? Baroux investigated the Americanization of collective unconscious and its superimposition on French cultural production, in L’Italien he continues to explore the cultural evolution of Frenchness. In the film, the connection between collective and individual identity is made through Jacques's character. An artist preparing an exhibit containing enlarged copies of passport pages, Jacques claims that Dino/Mourad's situation initiated his reflection on nationality and identity and on the difference between identity and identification. For reviews of the film, see Mintzer and Sontinel.
14 Quite controversial and problematic, the term Beur is used in France to loosely designate French nationals whose parents, like Dino's, are originally from the Maghreb.
15 On a biographical note, Kad Merad who plays Dino is well acquainted with the social implications of having a first name associated with a particular ethnic identity. He details his personal connections with Algerian, French, and Italian first names in an interview for L’Express. “Mourad,” Dino's “real” first name, is Kad Merad's uncle's name. Merad himself was originally asked to change his first name at the start of his career in radio and has been using “Kad,” a shorter version of his first name. The actor also tells the anecdote of meeting a “Brahim” who hid under an Italian name. For this interview, see Cirodde. Elsewhere, another autobiographical element confirms the actor's first-hand understanding of the connection between a French first name, national identity, and the workplace in France. This time, it involves his father who intentionally changed his first name from Mohamed to Rémi. See Randall.
16 For more on the concept of passing and its relationship to performance, see Butler.
17 This relates to Homi Bhabha's well-known discussion of “mimicry” in a colonial context. For a discussion of stereotypes in a French context, see Rosello.
18 In debates about immigration in France, several terms have been used historically: “assimilation,” “insertion,” and “integration.” See Maghraoui's outline of the political distinctions and implications of these terms.