The “movies with the word ‘district’ in the title” game changed forever in 2009 with District 9, and for good reason. Neill Blomkamp’s apartheid-plus-aliens “allegory” showed Hollywood's consent manufacturers what could be done on a limited budget if one really wanted to get down and dirty re-encoding anticolonial politics for a global audience. Unfortunately, District 9’s success eclipsed that of French director Pierre Morel’s searing and still underrated parkour masterpiece District 13 (also known as District B13 and Banlieue 13) from just five years earlier. Taking place in the near future 2010, entirely within a condemned banlieue (or French suburb) that holds some two million people in vertically concentrated apartments, Morel’s film uses a condemned-property setup to interrogate democracy’s failures at the turn of the millennium with the vaguest skein of a science fiction hook. None will be surprised to learn that Morel’s debut feature is one of the dozens of titles co-written by beyond-problematic French auteur Luc Besson, and produced by his once-mighty EuropaCorp studio.
District 13 stars parkour originator David Belle as Leïto, a reformed thug with a surprisingly realistic Vegeta haircut, born and bred within B13. After his much-desired younger sister Lola (Dany Verissimo) is taken hostage by the suburb’s kingpin, Taha (Bibi Naceri), he reluctantly joins forces with a straight-arrow undercover cop named Damien (Cyril Raffaelli) who has been tasked by the French government with infiltrating B13 in pursuit of a “clean” bomb that’s been accidentally rigged to go off in 23 hours. The two men couldn’t be from more different walks of life, yet the high-octane circumstances oblige them to trust one another against their respective instincts. Leito is the native undesirable, Damian the idealist colonizer whose worldview needs disabusing. This means every scene in their bromance is an opportunity for Damian to be radicalized; before they get on the same page, Damian cries out: “They taught me liberty, equality, fraternity!” Leito replies: “Water, gas, electricity!”
The lack of subtlety in District 13 is breathtakingly, brain-breakingly French. A more wisened, tired cineaste might survey the recombinant elements and (not inaccurately) write District 13 off as so much assembly-line fodder. Indeed, Morel’s film is not just derivative, but a breathtaking mosaic of derivatives: The Matrix meets La Haine meets Fight Club meets Run Lola Run. But it works. It keeps things moving fast enough and keeps you guessing long enough to more than justify its Pre-Code runtime of 74 minutes. District 13 is a neo-exploitation classic from the phenomenon contemporaneously described as “globalization,” an object lesson in trash cinema that now looks quaint and innocent for its psychotic ratio of populism and cynicism.
District 13 screens this evening, June 6, and on June 7, at the Museum of the Moving Image on 35mm as part of the series “See it Big: Stunts!”
