Being Beur in the Banlieue

The terms banlieue and beur used as signifiers to describe a specific type of urban film have been popular for decades. The word beur, as I have argued elsewhere, is an interesting term, having gained traction in the early 1980s as the children of North African immigrants came of age and began to contribute through literature, the fine arts, and film to the culture of France and elsewhere in Europe where French is spoken (see Orlando Reference Orlando2003). Beur, as one online source suggests, is a strange word “based on a very irrational construction, produced by a complex [linguistic] manipulation known as ‘verlan’ (or backwards talk).”^{Footnote 5} The linguist Barbara Bullock remarks that verlan, a popular coded language of the streets, is constructed from “words [that] are said backwards” in order to make constructions such as Arabe which becomes Beur. “Verlan, or ‘Street French’ [is] found along with the more conventionally accepted forms of argot (slang),” Bullock continues, emphasizing that “Verlan is one contemporary form of javanais in which, for example, the slang term poulet becomes lépou . . . through an inversion of syllables” (1996:180).^{Footnote 6}

Over recent decades, the term banlieue has changed meaning as the tides of immigration from North Africa have influenced the contours of French-speaking Europe. Carrie Tarr notes that “the banlieue [is now] a word which once referred to the suburbs in general but which is now used to refer to the depressing, outer city high-rise housing [projects] which have become identified with France's working-class and multiethnic postcolonial populations” (2007:32). For Europe’s “Others” represented on screen by both European and immigrant filmmakers—in French films such as Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995) and Coline Serreau’s Chaos (2001), or films of North and West African/French directors such as Karim Dridi’s Bye-Bye (1995), Mweze Ngangura Pièces d’identités (Identity Papers, 1998), and Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le Mulet (The Secret of the Grain, 2007)—the immigrant experience, even if cast somewhat comically (as in Merzak Allouache’s Salut Cousin! [Hi Cousin!, 1996] or Mahmoud Zemmouri’s 100% Arabica [1997]), evoke the city-space or, more specifically, the banlieue, as anything but positive.

Banlieue is the term of choice when French extremists of the National Front parties in France and in Belgium use the media to emphasize ethnic enclaves as responsible for increased crime and, more generally, all sorts of social ills that affect the entire country (Delwit Reference Delwit, Delwit and Poirier2007). (The French-speaking right-wing Front National, or FN, of Belgium won 5.4 percent of the vote in the French-speaking area of Brussels in 2003.) In general, in many countries in Europe, the rise of right-wing nationalist parties has been significant in recent years. The Flemish nationalist political party Vlaams Belang in Wallonia, Belgium, is not only anti-immigrant, but also anti–French speaking. Regardless of the party’s language, the right-wing anti-“Other” rhetoric is the same, and like in France (and elsewhere in Europe), it has increased its vehemence since the mid-1970s in the wake of economic crisis and “debates on institutional and political transformations in Belgium [which] favored the emergence of parties with a Poujadist or extremist dimension” (Delwit Reference Delwit, Delwit and Poirier2007:143).

Ben Yadir seeks to dismantle the iconic terms and hateful speech of the far right in his films in order to change the direction of the conversation on diversity and multiethnicity within the political context. His goal is to fashion new concepts of a multicultural, transnational space that is in process and constantly evolving.^{Footnote 7}Les Barons captures a unique transnational Being-in-the-world that explores what Maik Nwosu terms the “overlap and displacement of domains of difference” (2011:22). Here the overlapping and assemblage-making of the film’s protagonists take place in the city-space of contemporary Brussels. The protagonists’ Being-in-the-world transcends the fixed cultural, linguistic, and political paradigms of immigrant spaces that have often been depicted as disenfranchised locations. In Ben Yadir’s film, protagonists are “traveling signs” that “cross borders, both cultural and ideological” (Nwosu Reference Nwosu2011:28).

As a cosmopolitan, transnational film, Les Barons performs three functions as the denouement moves away from the fixed, stereotypical, and “accepted” portrayals of the immigrant in Europe that have been established in iconic films about banlieues. First, the film refutes the negative, normalized paradigms used to depict North African communities living in European cities. Second, Ben Yadir establishes a space for a cosmopolitan, multiethnic filmic narrative, strengthened by the blending of a multiplicity of cultural and social signs. Third, Les Barons promotes a unique, unfamiliar view of human relationships in Maghrebi space and a conception of Being-in-the-world that endorses an innovative view of global humanism that will influence, in my view, new themes in European cinema. Ben Yadir’s work exemplifies a new genre of urban film in which characters act as individuals, therefore refuting the ghetto gang image that casts them almost always as a collective body prone to committing violence.

The film dispels the negative labels associated with race and ethnicity in order to carve out original portrayals for youth growing up in urban settings in contemporary Europe. The young men in the film are connected to a variety of spaces to which they feel equally bound and committed. Hassan and his friends establish a sense of self-location that is an “ethnic-immigrant space . . . that is original, and defines an idea of ‘home’ [as] spatially imagined through demarcations of public and private spaces, ownership of territory, and placelessness” (Ghosh & Sarkar 1995–96:106). Conceptually, Les Barons is about the exploration of a Being-in-the-world that is situated in many spaces. Hassan, for example, is never trapped in any one location. His friend Aziz, in the beginning, is a “vaurien” (a bum), who spends most of his time sleeping on the piles of apples in shopkeeper Lucien’s store, but in the end he decides to make something of himself when he discovers his passion for the art of selling groceries. These examples make Les Barons a film that can be characterized by what it is not: not about ghetto violence, racism, car burning, rap music, or gang banging. Hassan and his friends realize that they are not hybrid, pulled between home and European communities, but rather multiple and invested in the locales and languages that surround them as they pass easily from one space to another. They benefit as individuals who are enriched by the various contacts they make with traditional European and immigrant communities. Ironically, their names—Hassan, Aziz, Mounir—evoke proud attachment to their communities of origin and provide continued sources of strength for conceptualizing their multiply diverse identities.

Brussels as a Multicultural Space of Unlimited Possibilities

While the city of Brussels presents challenges to Maghrebi immigrants, it also offers the émigré new roads that allow him/her to shape a unique Being-in-the-world that is neither Moroccan nor European, and neither dystopic nor totally utopic. Living in the center of Brussels, rather than on its outskirts, Ben Yadir’s individualistic, principled protagonist, Hassan Al Khoudouri, enjoys the freedom and exploration of new spaces and alternative places between his assimilated, multiethnic neighborhood and a tolerant white-European community living in the heart of the city. Ben Yadir’s multiethnic band of Barons—Hassan, Mounir, Aziz, and the white wanna-be Baron, Franck—refuse to be labeled by the European/Western stereotypes that seek to relegate them to the realms of the dysfunctional, delinquent, and violent. In the minds of all the characters, Brussels is a space that is overwhelmingly positive due to its multicultural makeup. The filmmaker sets this city apart from Paris by describing an immigrant-assimilated way of life that is not arduously negative: one can “glander plus pour vivre plus” (do nothing in order to live more), all the while forming a unique Being-in-the-world that is connected to a plurality of others. In Ben Yadir’s film, the urban space is the principal place of inclusion for all Francophones—ethnically diverse or white. In his version of the ethnic, global age, the “Other” in Europe refuses to be determined by Western stereotypes and the prosaic traditionalism (Islam, mosques, women covered in headscarves and chadors) that often is associated with Maghrebi immigrant communities. The filmmaker takes to task stereotypes, unpacks them, and then leaves the audience to decide whether or not a melting-pot has been achieved. As he stressed in an interview on TV5 Monde, “I made the film for the French-speaking community of Belgium. . . . . One is Belgian. . . . French–Flemish community, Brussels . . . that’s Belgium. . . . Identity is not questioned, one is Belgian and proud of it. . . .”^{Footnote 8}

Les Barons, based on the novel of the same title written by Nabil Ben Yadir and his co-author, Laurent Brandenbourger, proposes considering the city of Brussels as a “cosmopolitan patriot’s” transnational space. For Anthony Appiah, “the cosmopolitan patriot” entertains “the possibility of a world in which everyone is a rooted cosmopolitan, attached to a home of his or her own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different, places that are home to other, different, people” (1996:22). The transnational human values of the cosmopolitan patriot are engendered by his/her realization that “in such a world not everyone will find it best to stay in their natal patria, so that the circulation of people between different localities will involve not only cultural tourism (which the cosmopolitan admits to enjoying) but migration, nomadism, diaspora” (1996:22).

Nabil Ben Yadir’s cosmopolitan cinematographic text is one that promotes human connectedness as a result of living in the diasporas that criss-cross the city of Brussels. Les Barons offers viewers a multicultural understanding of Maghrebi characters who invest in others, their communities, and their own self-actualization. The filmmaker’s Barons tease Western European stereotypes by choosing “glander et magouiller” (doing nothing and manipulating), but without violence or damage to their community. For example, they never steal or burn cars (as the young men do in films such as La Haine and Bye-Bye), but focus on exploiting the system as so many European youth must do in order to survive in countries that have increasing unemployment rates, the highest of which impact the young.^{Footnote 9} Exploiting the system is central to protagonist Mounir’s racket of running into cars whose drivers fail to adhere to “priorité à droite” (the right of way) so that he can collect insurance money and help his fellow Barons survive. Hassan also refutes the typical, stereotyped Maghrebi-young-delinquent-male by choosing to follow his dream of becoming a professional stand-up comic in a gay bar in a downtown neighborhood that in itself is a locus for “Others” in the most diverse sense of the word.

Paying Homage to the Past

In the first few minutes of Les Barons, Ben Yadir establishes his commitment to transnational cosmopolitanism and pays tribute to the urban, edgy cinéma verité, cinéma du look, and beur and banlieue films made by filmmakers in the 1980s and 1990s. However, he does not allow his narrative to remain boxed in by the legacy of these genres. The first five minutes of Les Barons make reference to certain films that are immediately recognizable to French-speaking audiences who grew up watching urban immigrant films. While focusing the camera on three sets of tennis shoes as the Barons carry on a conversation, the filmmaker references Kassovitz’s three young men in La Haine (1995). Reminiscent of a scene in Kassovitz’s film, Hassan, Mounir, and Aziz try to guess the year and make of a passing motorcycle as they comment on the slow passage of time. Ben Yadir then films an exchange of jokes based on the fables of Jean de la Fontaine (notably La cigale et la fourmi, The Cicada and the Ant), thus calling to mind Merzak Allouache’s Salut Cousin! (1996). However, the homage and references to these past films stop here. Ben Yadir’s heroes offer an interracial, intergenerational, multicultural version of their own stories in order to disassociate themselves from this cinematic past. For example, Hassan doesn’t know the Jean de la Fontaine fable, therefore freeing himself from the commonality of the recognizable trope in French banlieue films (Allouache, Kassovitz) and the earlier Belgian-immigrant film Pièces d’identités (1998) by Mweze Ngangura. Although he doesn’t know the fable, Hassan also has not been adversely marked by an educational system in French which, for many immigrant youth depicted in earlier films (e.g., Salut Cousin! 1996), often involves memorizing poetry and taking dictées read out of the great works of the French nineteenth-century canon, which they profess to detest because they have no affinity with it.

Nabil Ben Yadir’s film promotes a view of transculturalism particular to our new millennium. In our contemporary times, “transnational modes of being are born from traveling across cultural-ideological boundaries” within immigrant communities and also outside them (Nwosu Reference Nwosu2011:32). Contemporary transcultural discourse announces a new era that now evokes points of reference that are no longer linked to the colonial experience, but rather are reimagined on their own terms. Ben Yadir’s plot is simple: the five young men are jobless, but “se débrouillent bien” (get along fine in their lives), and don’t feel like they are victims, but rather enjoy laughing at themselves. Although they do not profess having any solid career plans, they do not feel defeated or as if they have given into accepted labels defined by the European status quo. Describing his young Barons, Ben Yadir notes, “they do not say ‘we are coming,’ but say ‘let’s go.’ Their egos are all the same.”^{Footnote 10} The film is equally about young men who have dreams freed of their immigrant families’ traditionalism, but who also enjoy the pleasure of being ethnically rooted in a strong heritage they feel makes them unique. The young men want to know “what’s beyond” in order to live in a present that is connected to many different registers. As Ben Yadir notes, they live beyond “the neighborhood, the city, and [their] country. . . . They are going to go see what is happening outside without closing themselves up in the neighborhood, the country, [or] in Europe.”^{Footnote 11}

Hassan is educated, but also a member of the gang of Barons (which, he constantly notes to the audience, is nonviolent, supportive, and sometimes even oppressive in its rules about friendship); he strives to break the mode of “la glandouille” (someone who does nothing) in order to find his place in society. His passion is stand-up comedy. Sneaking out to perform in the local cabaret bar featuring a variety of acts by Brussels’ “marginals”—gays, cross-dressers, jugglers, and poets—Hassan mingles with white Belgians of the working class who enjoy their time drinking and performing acrobatics, contortions, and juggling, as well as singing and dancing. Hassan realizes that his more traditional immigrant Moroccan father would “kill him” if he knew he were doing stand-up comedy in a gay bar. His jokes are about family, immigrant life, Moroccan/Maghrebi customs, and the tendentious relationship he has with certain aspects of traditional immigrant identity. Indeed, his father, with whom he has a strained relationship, complains that Hassan has distanced himself from his roots, noting that his son “ne pourrait même pas égorger un mouton” (couldn’t even slit a sheep’s throat) if he had to. Even though he himself is rooted in the traditions of the homeland, the young man’s father is a successfully assimilated immigrant and a dedicated fonctionnaire (civil servant). The familial conflicts between Hassan and his father are not entrenched in family traditions but are more universal in tone, focusing on the ordinary trials and tribulations of fathers and sons (these include career choices and earning an income). At one point, Hassan’s father laments the fact that, although he has found a great job for Hassan in his own line of work as a bus driver, “his ungrateful son refuses to take it!”

Even though there are certain tensions at home, at no time does Hassan reject his love of Moroccan home space and his family; he simply realizes that he cannot be totally honest about his exterior life working as a stand-up comic. His efforts to avoid revealing the truth to his family make him paranoid. This paranoia reaches a humorous climax just after he is interviewed by a TV reporter named Malika (Hassan’s secret love and the sister of his best friend, Mounir). Malika comes to the cabaret to do a story on “local culture” and, to her surprise, discovers that her brother’s friend is doing stand-up comedy on the cabaret’s stage. He begs her not to air any footage of him, fearing his family will see it. Later, around the dinner table, watching Malika’s news report, Hassan is absorbed in a surrealist moment in which he imagines the TV story revealing everything about his secret life and his father subsequently murdering him. The imagined scene makes Hassan wonder aloud to the film’s audience, “why am I flipping out? . . . truly, why? It must come from somewhere, where?” He proceeds to enter a “Flashback” (clearly written on the wall behind him) to his time in elementary school where little Hassan is diligently taking dictation in French class. The older Hassan finds his younger self in the room, sits down next to him, and has a conversation:

The normalcy of this scene, set in the past, in a multiculturally diverse classroom in a school somewhere in Brussels, promotes the subtext that Belgium’s diversity is not only a phenomenon of contemporary multicultural paradigms. Ben Yadir’s narrative offers an alternative to what audiences would, more often than not, expect. The state-run school is neat, clean, and “ordinary,” depicting children taking (and enjoying) the quintessential dictée (dictation) of a famous passage from a nineteenth-century novel. The children of all races are assimilated as French speakers whose immigrant experience has been enhanced by a positive educational trajectory. Fanciful and whimsical? Perhaps, but Ben Yadir’s goal is to counter negative portrayals of contemporary immigrant life, and this scene most definitely achieves its aim.

After his father suffers a heart attack and is confined to bed, Hassan renounces his evenings as a stand-up comic and agrees to take up the older man’s job as a city bus driver. He has no difficulty being accepted by his father’s primarily white, Belgian, working-class coworkers who help him slip into the boring routine of being a bus driver. While driving across the seemingly endless neighborhoods of Brussels, he realizes that a life not following his dream of doing stand-up comedy will kill him. Hassan, like any individualist, strives not to be pigeonholed into a prefabricated identity or lifestyle. He realizes as he drives the bus through the maze of Brussels’ streets that his individualism will ultimately depend on an understanding of the self as authentic. This authentic self will be based on the choices he makes between cultivating continuous ties with his home—the North African sphere—and the European Belgian one which he uses to fashion his particular identity, or according to Heidegger, his “Being-with oneself.” This is a self that does rely on the community of others to help define its uniqueness, but also is not effaced in the “lostness in the ‘they’” (1962:312). Hassan supports an existentialist ideal of being responsible for his individual happiness, while also feeling he needs to contribute to his community. Yet the young man also realizes that seeking total individuality, exercising his agency to the fullest, will prove difficult to achieve. Defending individualism against the status quo, which is meted out by family and adopted Belgian, working-class norms, becomes arduous. The young protagonist finally realizes to what extent retaining his individualism is difficult after a series of setbacks, the most major of which involves marriage. He halfheartedly asks Milouda, a “nice girl” he’s met on his bus route, to marry him because he thinks he should (for the sake of his family’s wishes). He hopes he can grow to love Milouda and renounce his true love for Malika, which is an impossible love because she is his best friend’s sister and the credo of the Barons is “Barons don’t date friends’ sisters.” Malika is beautiful and successful, a TV reporter who is the pride of the Maghrebi community. She also exemplifies how Ben Yadir’s filmic transcultural space is about following dreams and passions, rather than kowtowing to the constraints of an immigrant traditionalism, often thought to be particularly unfavorable for women. Malika is a university graduate, has a successful career making a very good salary, and lives by herself in her own apartment. She refuses to let her brother Mounir run her life in the typical fashion, she claims, “of overbearing Maghrebi brothers.” She also candidly tells Hassan that she is “not a virgin.” Malika breaks the stereotype of the submissive Muslim woman, an immigrant archetype so often portrayed by the West as a reason for assimilation to Western values. Her emancipated role counters how women are represented in certain films such as Des poupées et des anges (Of Puppets and Angels, 2008) and Leila née en France (Leila born in France, 1993). Although these films “portray Maghrebi immigrant families and focus on issues that affect women in particular, often this portrayal borders on the sensationalistic, such as domestic violence, forced marriages, the veil, and limited access to space at home” (Geesey Reference Geesey, Durmelat and Swamy2011:163).^{Footnote 12} In contrast to this imagery, the young women in Ben Yadir’s film are, for the most part, as dynamic and individualistic as the Barons in the gang. In the film there are no symbolic or real forms of what Ben Yadir conceptualizes as repressive (veils, hijabs, mosques, male violence against women) shaping either the young women’s or men’s life choices, only hurdles and challenges that most young people face in the new millennial age.

Refuting the Trope of the Marginalized Beur–Banlieue Space

Ben Yadir’s commitment to taking his narrative out of the traditional, marginalized immigrant space means emphasizing that his community lives inside the heart of Brussels in an ethnically diverse neighborhood. This is an important aspect, “since banlieue film is so closely associated with its portrayal of outlying urban spaces” that are usually characterized as non-lieux (non-places) or basically spaces without a soul: “suburban landscape[s] . . . associated with ‘supermodernity’[,] . . . large shopping centers, airports, peripheral highways, and so on” (Geesey Reference Geesey, Durmelat and Swamy2011:162). These soulless spaces do not allow for cross-cultural exchange between white Europeans-de-souche (native-born) and the immigrant communities that are now part of the fabric of the country.

Since Ben Yadir’s Maghrebi inhabitants’ interactions with white Belgians (such as Lucien, the owner of the local grocery store, the bus drivers, auto mechanics, and metro ticket takers) take place without incident in the heart of Brussels, the tensions characteristic of the soulless non-lieux are nonexistent. In a humorous twist on identity soul-searching, Franck, who is white and of the working class, strives to be accepted into the group of Barons. He uses the few Arabic words he has acquired and insists on standing in the unemployment line with Hassan, Mounir, and Aziz, “like a true Baron.” Franck, like all Ben Yadir’s characters, functions in spaces of positive displacement. This means that he and all the other members of the group easily transit from one space to another without compromising their overall sense of belonging to the larger urban community of Brussels. Most definitely, “the traversing of space becomes a metaphor for, and a visual representation of, the detours that are essential to the [protagonists’] self-location. . . .” The young men benefit from “contact between different cultures and the consequent dual semiosis of hybridization and nativization” that occurs in the overlap of Brussels’ white-European and Maghrebi cultures (Ghosh & Sarkar 1995–96:105). The group bonding that takes place between Franck and his Maghrebi Barons erases lines between hybrid and native in order to privilege the valuable social bonds that occur simply when young men are together.

Interestingly, traversing boundaries in Ben Yadir’s film becomes dangerous when transiting from urban defined loci to the rural unknown. When Mounir ventures out to the Walloon countryside in the BMW collectively purchased by all the Barons, he is labeled as a “Francophone” rather than just an immigrant. He is accused of being a “foreigner” and chastised for not being familiar with rural ways, as noted in a scene toward the end of the film. When Mounir asks a Flemish cyclist in French “où est la gare” (where is the train station?) in a small suburban town outside Brussels where he’s planning to meet his friend Franck, the man on the bike sarcastically responds (in very Flemish accented French), “dans ton pays” (in your country). Mounir is perceived as an outsider not because he’s Maghrebi, but because he is Francophone, from the French-speaking city. Ben Yadir emphasizes that it is the rural, Flemish (primarily ethnically Belgian-white) space, not the urban, multicultural, predominantly Francophone one that is hostile to Mounir. The cyclist’s sentiment echoes the wider context of the political climate of Wallonia, Belgium, as Pascal Delwit notes in several essays on the right-wing politics of the Belgian National Front, which is favored in rural regions:

Ben Yadir’s political message is not lost on Belgian audiences who have seen their country increasingly divided along political lines that are rooted in attachment to region, language, and rural (or urban) values. Flanders—Flemish speaking, more conservative, and right-wing voting—faults nonwhites as responsible for a host of ills in Belgium today.^{Footnote 13} The more liberal, French-speaking urban environment is touted as home to diversity, multiculturalism, and the cosmopolitanism of young Belgians, such as Hassan and his friends. In the end, it is this rural, Flemish setting, devoid of the cosmopolitan layers so essential to the well-being of the Barons, where Mounir meets his end. His car is T-boned by a Mack Truck when he fails to give “priorité à droite” on a suburban road. The accident instantly kills him.

Movement in Cosmopolitan Space

In films such as Les Barons, “the spaces that the protagonists occupy become a central feature in their acts of self-representation” (Gosh & Sarkar 1995–96:109). Self-representation for the Barons is rooted in movement and displacement, thus clearly denoting that Ben Yadir thinks of his protagonists as identity “producers,” as Stuart Hall suggests, who are “never complete, always in process, always constituted within, not outside, representation” (1990:222). Scenes of physical movement abound in this film, capturing the filmmaker’s claim that his characters always say “on y va” (let’s go). Although Mounir’s movement outside the urban-home environment proves lethal, transit between cosmopolitan spaces of the city is propitious. It is movement through the urban, Francophone spaces of Brussels that fosters a sense of transcultural identity, hope for the future, and freedom. In one magically surreal scene, the young men literally fly through the streets after avoiding the traditional Maghrebi dinner Hassan’s parents organized for him to celebrate his upcoming marriage to Milouda. Escaping the family’s dinner table, Hassan walks out into the street to find his fellow Barons. The suffocating space of the familial apartment is replaced by the movement and vibrancy of the outside street as the scene rapidly unfolds when the Barons decide to “faire l’antilope joyeuse” (do the happy antelope), a game they played as kids. As the band lopes “like antelopes” down the street, they are magically lifted up above the sidewalks and boulevards, literally to fly—se déterritorialiser—through the air. Airborne, they defy the humanly possible, thus creating a “mise-en-scène . . . [that] . . . evokes an ‘other’ space” (Gosh & Sarkar 1995–96:109). The young men’s flight deterritorializes them, thus carving out a new becoming that is limitless and not bound by sociocultural mores and norms. High above the ground, flying in new and uncharted territory, the protagonists move along lines of flight to “new points located outside the limits and in other directions” (Deleuze & Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi1987:11). Deterritorialization, as Deleuze and Guattari tell us, allows for one to “increase [his] territory” (1987:11). The lines of flight afford subjects the opportunity to “get outside the dualisms” and to “be-between, to pass between” and to exist in the “intermezzo” (1987:277). The au-delà, high-up-above space, over the streets of Brussels, collapses the metaphorical, physical, and ideological divisions that occur on the ground. In this gravity defying third-space, devoid of all cultural markers, the world below looks hopeful as it projects a sense of Being-in-the-world that is limitless in its possibilities.

Unlike most beur and banlieue films, where the immigrant relationship to institutions in the European host country (France in particular) has only been confrontational and stagnant, with little access to social services, the flying young men are free agents, masters of their own destinies. They have no need of the state, neither its institutions nor its rules, and will not be bound by it. Noticeably in Ben Yadir’s film, apart from the unemployment office where Hassan, Mounir, and Aziz go to register their continuing unemployed status, state institutions are invisible. The Barons are not brutalized by the police as in Kassovitz’s La Haine, or upbraided by unhelpful, high school social workers as in Ils disent que je suis une beurette (They Say I’m a Beurette, 2001) by Soraya Nini, where Soraya is told by her Caucasian high school counselor that she should “think about finding a job” after graduating instead of going on to university. Conversely, Ben Yadir’s characters follow a script not bound by the color of their skins, the rigid institutions of Europe, or the place of their parents’ origins. Hassan doesn’t seek to escape a ghetto, violence, racism, or school, but rather the bland destiny of middle-class life, the kind of life his father wants for him: “You’ll have a job, a bonus, a wife . . . and soon I’ll be a grandfather.” By flying high in their unfettered space, the Barons avoid all the stereotyped spaces in which they could be caught down below.

At the close of this scene, when the Barons come down from their flight above the streets and treetops of Brussels, Hassan sees more clearly and realizes he cannot marry Milouda because he really does love Malika. Out of breath, he notes, “I can’t marry Milouda guys. The problem is, I can’t talk to my father.” Mounir points out that he “can’t either.” “Yeh,” Hassan responds, “but I’m in deep shit.” He not only must face his father’s disappointment, but also the arduous task of telling Mounir about the love he feels for Mounir’s sister, thus risking breaking the credo of the Barons.

On Being Globally Connected in the World

In 1990 Stuart Hall asked, in his article entitled “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” whether or not the new narratives of the formerly colonized, who now live in the diaspora, would follow Frantz Fanon’s prescriptions in The Wretched of the Earth and either unearth “that which the colonial experience buried and overlaid, bringing to light the hidden continuities it suppressed . . . [or] retell the past” in order to produce new identities (1990:224). It is clear that in our new millennium, Ben Yadir has opted to do neither. The film demonstrates that having to embrace a version of immigrant, assimilated identity configured only within the terms dictated by the Caucasian European norm of the host country, at least with respect to Brussels, is no longer obligatory for the urban Francophone. The Maghrebi-Belgian can live in, and reap the benefits of, a cosmopolitan, urban life that is not “foreign” or unwelcoming. Hassan and his friends do not feel labeled as Maghrebi (with all the negative connotations it evokes for white Europeans), nor do they express any allegiance to tropes of the traditional diaspora. These include turning inward to the homeland to define their difference as a way to counter labels invented by the host country. Denying their cosmopolitan worldview in order to connect to a perceived “lost” identity is not in their life-plan. They do not find a sense of community by joining a mosque, becoming radicalized, and/or committing acts of violence out of frustration and despair. Rather, Ben Yadir maintains that his protagonists are individualists linked to the place—Brussels—in which they live, while they have also chosen to invest in Belgian multculturality. “This isn’t an immigrant story,” the filmmaker notes,

For Ben Yadir, Brussels is not Paris, Lyon, or any other large city in France, nor is his vision of cinema constrained by the usual paradigms of national cinema linked to ideas of nationhood, belonging, and identity. In a multiculturally connected millennium, Les Barons sets the bar for an original type of European film that promotes a new “diasporic subject” who is able to function within “the diverse performative modes of sharply contrasting cultural and ideological worlds” (Shohat & Stam Reference Shohat and Stam1994:42). This subject is able to transcend the singular, national context of the host country. According to Stuart Hall, in the 1990s immigrant success at establishing “cultural identity” was measured by how well communities defined “belonging” and “becoming.” This process also involved linking their present realities in the adopted nation to “recovering a past” that was “waiting to be found,” and which, when once found, would offer a sense of selfhood (1990:4). By contrast, in our millennium, filmmakers like Ben Yadir focus on the here and now as a Being-in-the-world that is only linked loosely to any one place or nation at any given time. The filmmaker’s characters are borderless, diasporic, national, and transnational all at the same time, without being defined in the interstices of a hyphen, hybridized in the schizophrenic identities of Moroccan-Belgian, Moroccan-French, Maghrebi-European. What we learn from hyphens is that they reflect roots and stability on the one hand, but also a limited and fixed identity pulled between two poles on the other. When Ben Yadir proclaims that his characters are “Belgian” and “Francophone,” he enlarges the group of reference to extend beyond immigrant and national identities in order to embrace the transnational French-speaking world. The cineaste creates a cinéma-monde much along the lines of la littérature-monde, which is a literary space that defines transnational writing in French (Le Bris 2007:41). Drawing on this concept, the film becomes a mondiale (wordly) text that, as Terri Carr notes, reflects a new kind of cinema-making, embracing a desire to render present “ethnic minorities or other marginalized characters” while also engaging “with different narratives of Frenchness” (2007:19). This cinematic Frenchness, like that found inherently in the worldly French text, is “a new literature, noisy, busy, colored, bi-racial . . . where cultures from every continent mix . . . [and authors’] ambition [is] to utter the world, to give a sense to existence, to question the human condition, to drive each one of us to the most inner secret of ourselves. Littérature-monde . . . is the giving birth of a new world” (2007:41). Scholars in the field of Francophone studies argue that the concept of la littérature-monde offers a “belated recognition of the creative decentering of the French literary world” as readers enter “multilingual environments” (Lionnet Reference Lionnet2009:203). These environments encourage reflection on the interconnection of language, culture, and politics in new ways that extend beyond postcolonial paradigms which have often ghettoized protagonists in convenient stereotypes understandable for French-European white readers.

Ben Yadir’s cinematic text, much like the works of contemporary authors of French expression contributing to la littérature-monde, promotes a new conception of what it means to be Francophone in transnational space. The Being-in-the-world of Maghrebi, international, and transnational filmmakers like Nabil Ben Yadir takes to heart a Heideggerian challenge: “the task of inquiring into the ontological structure of the ‘world’ and defining the idea of worldhood as such. . . . All entities whose Being ‘in’ one another can thus be described [as having] the same kind of being—that of Being-present-at-hand—as Things occurring ‘within’ the world” (1962:78–79). Thus Ben Yadir’s characters, ethnically rooted yet connected to others who are different from them, enjoy a “Being in the world . . . [that is understood] as bound up in its ‘destiny’ with the Being of those entities which it encounters within its own world” (1962:82). The cosmopolitan protagonists in Les Barons are global citizens whose identity is defined along lines of flight, constantly in motion and always in process. They are metaphorically flying above the fray, looking down from above on the challenges that face us all in the new millennium.