“Cannes est à nous aussi!” exclaimed director Houda Benyamina fiercely as she raised her 2016 Camera D’Or prize up in the sky. She won the award in May for her first feature film, Divines – a dazzling coming-of-age story where teenage Dounia (Oulaya Amamra) and her best friend Maimouna (Déborah Lukumuena) dream of roaring material wealth and freedom while living unacknowledged in the poverty of a slum in Paris. Dounia, the daughter of a single, alcoholic mother, and Maimouna, of religious and protective parents, feel entrapped in a place where all they are taught to aspire to is the quiet acceptance of their surroundings’ collective misery. With this, the girls’ thirst for an ecstatic future leads them to force themselves into the world of crime as they start working for a respected neighborhood dealer, Rebecca (Jisca Kalvanda), who ushers them to “dare to be rich”. As the movie progresses, the climb towards what are especially Dounia’s ambitions proves to be an enthusing but abstruse one too.
Divines is authentic in all its angles. The cast tops the brilliance of the characters with every scene; especially Amamra, whose portrayal of Dounia successfully evokes a mixture of tenderness and toughness, and Lukumuena, who’s character represents comic relief and, at the same time, a voice of reason as the storyline progresses. An interesting fact is that Amamra is actually director Benyamina’s sister, who trained both young actresses for years in a workshop called 1,000 Visages, which the director herself founded with the goal of working towards the democratization of the film industry. Benyamina set up the workshop after witnessing the 2005 riots in France which, in turn, also inspired the film. As she explained to Screen Daily in an interview back in May, “there was anger in that moment. I could see my brothers demonstrating in the streets. But nobody was revolting. The intelligentsia didn’t get involved. Also, I started to think how money and possessions are the values of today’s society”. This feeling of fury that the marginalized fiercely channeled in the riots is also depicted in Divines, with a huge social commentary on the motives behind it and society’s response to it – particularly through the film’s portrayal of the relationship between the police and the banlieue community.
Sadly, what is authentic as well is the scenery: Dounia’s shanty town in the movie is actually a real location on the edge of Paris. It is a camp that was originally mainly populated by Roma people; although today, new currents of migration, such as Maghreb or black African, have also added to the community. Benyamina herself knows what it is like to be caught between cultures, being born in France but coming from parents who migrated to Europe from Africa in the mid-1970s. As she explained in an interview with The Guardian back in November, “I think it’s an absence of values, an absence of spirituality, of understanding and knowledge of the culture these young people came from. That ignorance, that lack of belonging creates monsters. Because society in which they live, what they consider their country, they feel like they’ve been rejected from it, so they create this new identity. It’s like a protest identity. I would compare it to the punk movement”. Such spiritual void is as well envisioned in Divines; for example, in a beautiful scene where the two best friends debate the existence of a greater presence watching and caring over them or, for instance, in Dounia’s found oasis within her attraction for a ballet dancer she has shyly fallen in love with. Still, in that same interview with the British newspaper, Benyamina insisted that “ultimately it’s a film about poverty, a film about injustice. That’s what I’m really interested in.” This is very vividly rendered in the film not only through watching the precarious conditions that the girls and their community has to face on a daily basis, but also through the plot’s development into a story that fits within a larger social tragedy.
Finally, the movie sheds light on the struggles of women too. The challenge that Houda Benyamina had to endure behind the scenes to get support for the project is already in itself an example. The film had trouble finding distribution – all the French TV stations said no, except state owned France 2, which, coincidentally or not, had a woman in charge of the selection. Benyamina said it in her Cannes speech in May: “it’s not a problem of quality – there’s not a lack of decent female films, it’s that there aren’t any women on the selection committees”. However, also within the film itself there is a dispatch on female power. The different women in the movie go through their difficulties with boldness; for instance, with Dounia seeking to protect her mother from those who take advantage of her solitude for easy sex or, most prominently, having to defend herself from her own predators. Dounia’s character represents a call for dignity and recognition as an independent and capable woman – who not only will fight sturdily to prove her relevance but who will also have the back of other important women in her life, such as Maimouna or her mother. As Rebecca exclaims when Dounia proves her competence and courage to take up a job in the drug dealing business, “you’ve got clitoris, I like that”.
But, above all, Divines is a fun, breathtaking and endearing film. The dialogues have that way of being compelling while at the same time containing larger depths, the audiovisual sequences are sublime and the plot is engaging from the start until the end. After Cannes, Netflix acquired the film and, ever since November, it has been available in 130 countries for its viewers to watch. If you still have not watched it by now, you should; as not only will Divines leave you stuck to your seat, but also because its message is vividly relevant in today’s society.