18/02/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche hijacks the heist film genre, separating out the genre’s codes and dynamics, to smuggle in a more authentic chronicle of the banlieue

"Love takes no prisoners, it takes volunteers; you need soft skin and nerves of steel (…) May desire surpass me, keep me on high alert, without forgetting our armour, or our arms." The song La beauté du jour is a strange and fairly surprising choice for a funeral, sung with captivating intensity in church by Annkrist, just a few dazzling sequences after the brilliant opening of Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s new film The Temple Woods Gang [+see also:
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It was clear that on throwing himself into a heist film, the French-Algerian director who’s well-known for his singular works which are regularly shown in major festivals (notably Back Home [+see also:
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The film follows a small group of long-term friends from a housing estate in Bordeaux (whose name refers to an area in the Paris region) who hold up the Anglo-Saxon steward (Lucius Barre) of an Arab prince (Mohamed Aroussi) on a road in the South of France, with the help of automatic weapons. "It’s the jackpot": lots of money, jewels, watches... But their collective joy, tempered by the need to keep a low profile, will be of short duration because they’ve also nabbed a briefcase full of "sensitive documents" which the prince (a fan of horse racing and art) is determined to claw back. A trusted investigator (Slimane Dazi) sets out on their trail and, very soon, the team of thieves (Philippe Petit, Kenji Meunier, Salim Ameur-Zaïmeche, Kamel and Rida Mezdour, Nassim Zazoui and Sylvain Grimal) find danger hot on their heels. All of this under the slightly vacant eye (his cigarette hanging from his mouth on a balcony, when he’s not filling in racing forms at a bar) of Mr Pons (Régis Laroche), a former army sniper who has just buried his mother and who has watched all the members of this little gang grow up.

It is, in fact, a family story that’s told by the film, using barely sketched out characters, a family from a housing estate which is emblematic of every other housing estate in the world, plonked near but yet so far from town centres; an “elastic” family with deep ties and simple dreams who take the time to chat on street corners and who feast at a Lebanese “deli” set up in a car park alongside a motorway; a family who live and die together, diametrically opposed to the worlds of petrol sheiks. The rest – chases, gun fights, doors broken down by men in balaclavas – is nothing but a tale of cowboys and Indians for which Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche knows all the cinematographic tricks and which he depicts perfectly (with a keen sense of effective and economic dialogue), but which only serves as a vague backdrop for his real interest ("he’d sell his own mother for cash, that American, but we don’t have the same mentality"). It definitely results in a certain strangeness, which might feel flawed for the more linear souls among us, but for others it only lends more charm to the film’s indescribable opacity.

The Temple Woods Gang is produced by Sarrazink Productions and sold worldwide by Reason8.

(Translated from French)