"If you’re all together on this bus, it’s the work of fate." The intersection or the clash between the individual and the collective is the focus of much debate in democratic societies right now, where antagonistic desires, divides and tensions are on the rise, for good or for bad. And this conundrum reaches its zenith in The Night Bus, Morade Aïssaoui’s promising debut feature film which was screened in the 26th Arras Film Festival’s Perspectives of French Cinema section.

However, since the filmmaker had no desire to assail audiences with a pontificating, sociological endeavour, Aïssaoui has opted for the medium of genre film and an escalating spiral of turmoil which sucks his trapped main characters into a situation which reveals the many hidden poisons eating away at daily life for the working classes (rudeness, selfishness, racism, xenophobia, scapegoating, desire, internalised danger now ready to explode, etc.) but also the unexpected power of solidarity.

Friendship and life on the outskirts of Paris have been uniting factors in the childhoods of youngsters Aïssa (Riadh Belaïche), who’s well on the way to a career in professional football, Oscar (Bakary Diombera), who babysits his father who’s been a fractious alcoholic since the death of Oscar’s mother, and Simon (Gaspard Gevin-Hié), whose brother is in prison. The trio have a brilliant night out in the capital on the Pont des Arts (despite being turned away from a nightclub) and subsequently take the 121 night-bus home. But then things go pear-shaped following a minor altercation with a rude passenger. The situation escalates, sarcastic Oscar steps in, insults hit home, ("start by telling this animal not to start on me") and then things get physical. The driver sends out a distress call and someone pulls out a weapon, leading to an attempted police intervention and a shot being fired, which only makes things worse. Taking control of the bus, our three panicked friends ("this is going to end really badly", "They think we’re terrorists", "no-one’s going to believe us") speed through the night with a handful of other passengers and the police on their tail…

"We just want to get off the bus." Slowly heightening the ambient stress levels as the trio’s bus-bound flight continues, the director plays very naturally with the passengers’ interactions, each of them gradually revealing their own troubles and internalised pain. It’s a huis clos-style human puzzle on wheels, which paints an incredibly tense, cosmopolitan picture where extreme divisions and distrust evolve in line with the film’s breathtaking ups and downs (unfolding almost in real time), until a collective awakening takes place ("there’s no them, there’s no us: we’re all in the same boat, we’re together") just as the danger begins to spike. It’s a rough-edged, 200mph parable about social divisions, reconciliation and pain, which Morade Aïssaoui envelops with an imposing score composed by Paul Sabin and which is a welcome (and punchy) break from the usual focuses of French first films, as if a modern heir (relatively speaking) to Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine and Michel Gondry’s The We and The I [+leggi anche:
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scheda film]. Aïssaoui’s action films are by no means lacking in reflection, and we’ll be following his career with great interest to see what route he’ll take next.

The Night Bus was produced by Ripley Films and Cheyenne Federation, in co-production with Wild Bunch (who’ll be distributing the film in French cinemas on 4 February) and Umedia. WTFilms are managing world sales.