InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 10

FESTIVAL COVERAGE
free time, tricking out his wheelchair to hide drugs from the
Ronin and tinkering with something or other in the basement of
his building. Christophe thinks the Ronin dropped a dime on him
to get him out of the way, and wants to rob their stash houses to
get recompense for his time served. An aura of potential violence
hangs over every scene, as various encounters threaten to
tumble over from loaded conversation to outright warfare.
This is largely the stuff of “cinéma de banlieue,” a familiar genre
of French cinema charting life in these suburban spaces typically
home to the poor and immigrants. Writer/director Cédric Ido,
himself French Burkinabe, knows the milieu well. But if The
Gravity begins as something akin to La Haine, it gradually
transforms into something much odder, and more interesting.
Because while these characters act out their interpersonal
conflicts, a strange cosmological event begins taking shape. Ido
allows details to creep in slowly at first, mostly via TV news
broadcasts emanating from the background; the planets are
slowly converging in a once-in-a-lifetime happening, and
commentators disagree on what, if any, effects this convergence
might have on the Earth. Meanwhile, Ido and cinematographer
David Ungaro slowly complicate the visual scheme of their film.
Brief cutaways track the slow movements of various celestial
bodies, while drone shots of the banlieue skyline take on the
portentous dread of the long Steadicam shots in The Shining. The
film slowly drains the life out of the banlieue until it seems
populated only by the main characters and a seemingly endless
number of Ronin, who have been driven mad by the convergence.
Ido, a self-confessed “fanboy,” seems determined to expand his
narrative into increasingly strange, genre-adjacent digressions.
There are comic book-style transitions between scenes, while
the Ronin seem plucked from Walter Hill’s The Warriors. Things
eventually deteriorate into outright horror territory, while an
action sequence late in the film seems inspired by the
concussive, blunt object-head trauma choreography favored by
South Korean action movies (and the Oldboy hammer fight in
particular). Even anime elements make an appearance, with a
mech-like contraption that appears in a fist-pumping moment of
triumph. It’s all very exciting, and while Ido risks absurdity with
his disparate influences, he’s so gleefully committed to his
scenario that it all somehow manages to work. It remains to be
seen what kind of adventurous distributor might take a chance
on such a strange, willful genre hybrid, or how they would even
market it to an unsuspecting audience. But it’s a remarkable film,
thrillingly unpredictable and even beautiful in its own way. Ido is
a major talent, that’s for sure. We need more films like The
Gravity, willing to bend and shape genre to its own idiosyncratic
ends. In this sense, at least, it bears a resemblance to Clement
Cogitore’s Sons of Ramses, another nocturnal excursion into the
underbelly of French society. Make seeking this film out a
priority. — DANIEL GORMAN
THREE NIGHTS A WEEK
Florent Gouëlou
Three Nights a Week is less the love story between a straight man
and a drag queen it has been billed as, and rather a love letter to
a subculture and the invitations that it opens. Photographer
Baptiste (Pablo Pauly) is ostensibly straight. He visits a World
AIDS Day awareness event that his girlfriend Samia (Hafsia Herzi)
is involved with, intending to use some of the local drag scene in
his art. Though he is intrigued by the images of freedom through
performance and the glitter from ashes on an artistic level, one
particular queen does catch his eye. Cookie Kunty (Romain Eck)
is strangely hypnotic and calming, whether through Baptiste’s
eyes or not, and, as she takes a slow, practiced drag of a
cigarette lit, with confidence, by a male admirer; more alluring to
him than she is to Samia, and a reminder of Baptiste’s marriage
to another, matte-r world.
The relationship begins just like so many on screen: a love story
between the idea of a man and the idea of a woman. Only it’s not
long before Baptiste finds himself running into Quentin, the man
behind the magic, and reconciling the reality of a gay
relationship with the larger-than-life partner he has in Cookie
proves hard at first. Even Quentin is shyer without the avatar of
Cookie, hiding painted nails from a server and markedly less
overwhelmed with confidence by his lover’s side. But the “it’s not
guys, it’s just him” (though in this case, it’s just her, to begin with)
excuse is trite and uninteresting even with the genderplay twist,
and Baptiste’s insistence to his girlfriend as their relationship
devolves — that this is an exception, not a rule for him — may be
sometimes realistic but narratively does feel like conflict invoked
for the sake of romantic complication, somewhat unnecessary
when the leads have chemistry from the start.
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