Seine-Saint-Denis on screen

Calling a film Les Misérables could lead to confusion … which film? I hear you say. Indeed, according to the IMDB database there are no fewer than 17 feature films with that exact title, the earliest dating from 1912. But Ladj Ly, director of the 2019 release, would have more of a claim than most: he grew up in Montfermeil (Seine-Saint-Denis) where part of Victor Hugo’s novel takes place. Hugo’s villégiature (‘holiday’) in Montfermeil in 1845 had inspired him to site there l’auberge (‘the inn’) Au sergent de Waterloo, a sinister place where the poor Cosette was regularly beaten and abused at the hands of les époux Thénardiers (‘the Thénardier spouses’). There are places that never quite get away from their fictional past, as Ladj Ly’s rendition of Les Misérables confirms in Montfermeil. In the film, young Issa, severely wounded by the local policemen, is the new Cosette, while the cops become the modern-day incarnation of the Thénardiers. The journey from a peaceful village to one of France’s most haunted banlieues, at the very centre of the 2005 riots, is worth recounting. 

Montfermeil’s story is an integral part of France’s vast housing construction programme post-1945 during Les Trente Glorieuses, a 30-year period of economic growth in France following the Second World War – and it started well. In 1962 Bernard Zehrfuss, the prominent architect of the UNESCO HQ and the CNIT (Centre of New Industries and Technologies), both in Paris, was appointed as the architect and planner of La Cité des Bosquets in Montfermeil. A sound archive from 1967 cheerfully attests to the idyllic nature of the project: ‘The new face of Montfermeil, Les Bosquets: 1,500 dwellings, with roads, schools, a shopping centre, flowerbeds, shrubs and ponds, makes for a pretty picture.’ However, as Xavier de Jarcy argues in Les Abandonnés (AR May 2019), Zehrfuss should never have accepted the project. Building works minister Pierre Sudreau’s planning team originally turned it down – ‘it was a trap’ – but it went ahead, overruled by a higher committee. And the trap was the near-complete isolation of Les Bosquets; a planned motorway (A87) was never built, nor was a scheduled dual carriageway (RN3). Hugo was right, ‘Montfermeil n’était sur la route de rien’ (Montfermeil was on the road to nothing) and remained so for decades with devastating consequences for its inhabitants. 

Les Misérables, 2019, describes the lives of teenagers running to escape the violence of police in the once ambitious but isolated housing estates outside the Périphérique

Thirty years after the completion of the last buildings, the lack of public transport was poignantly portrayed in Wesh Wesh (2001) (the equivalent to ‘wassup’ in Algerian slang), a film by Rabah Ameur- Zaïmeche, winner of the Prix Louis-Delluc for Best First Film. The film begins with Kamel, who returns for the first time to Les Bosquets after two years in Algeria, having previously been deported from France. For the last stretch of his journey home, he attempts to hitchhike but ends up walking along the road past interminable rows of houses characteristic of la banlieue pavillonnaire (‘the residential suburb’); dubbed ‘les ghettos de riches’ by the cité’s inhabitants, the two worlds do not mix. Ameur-Zaïmeche, who was also brought up in Les Bosquets, manages with Wesh Wesh to convey a sense of claustrophobia, a world from which it is difficult to escape, with little prospect of employment, and where drug dealing is the only hope – clearly, there is no happy ending.

As if the lack of public transport were not enough, Les Bosquets fell victim to another calamity: Logécos, a cheap loan system, available in the ’50s and ’60s, allowing private investors to buy flats – known as copropriétés – built by private developers. As with many other grands ensembles across France, the elegant blocks conceived by Zehrfuss may look like traditional public housing HLMs (Habitation à Loyer Modéré), but they were in fact privately owned, often by offshore companies hoping to make a quick profit. Only 1 per cent were owner-occupied in Les Bosquets in the 1960s, the remainder being rented. Furthermore, the overheads for building maintenance were exceedingly high compared with the HLMs, and quickly the tenants fell into arrears, resulting in a rapid degradation of the building fabric, faulty lifts, flat roof failure and broken windows. It took decades for the French government to buy back the copropriétés, the first step towards any urban renovation plan, a process only achieved in 2007 in Les Bosquets.

In Wesh Wesh, 2001, director Rabah Ameur‑Zaïmeche portrays an isolated community, the victims of an only half-realised cité: the housing estate Les Bosquets

Les Bosquets was completed, but plans for a highway and dual carriageway were abandoned, segregating communities and cutting off its new inhabitants from their surroundings

By 1990, Les Bosquets had a population of 9,000 inhabitants, 30 per cent under 18, 95 per cent of foreign origin, 36 different nationalities and more than half of the unemployed population in Montfermeil. Shot on location in Les Bosquets, with the inhabitants playing themselves, Wesh Wesh is an accurate cinematic spatial ethnography of everyday life circa 2000, consistent with Ameur-Zaïmeche’s background in urban anthropology. Particularly striking is the contrast between the graffiti-covered entrances, strewn with detritus, the Zehrfuss facades only a shadow of their former selves, and the interior of Kamel’s family home, kept in pristine condition by his proud mother. Between 1990 and the time Wesh Wesh was filmed, the population had decreased as many tenants jumped ship, resulting in some Zehrfuss buildings being half vacant. A demolition programme started in 1994 and the first 10-floor building was blown up on a sunny day, a festive occasion for which the municipality organised a barbecue, a rare social gathering between Les Bosquets and the rest of Montfermeil. The television news recorded this momentous occasion, but falsely reported that a building by Le Corbusier had bitten the dust – as if Corb were held responsible for all the world’s ills. 

But in 2005, the story of Les Bosquets takes a much more dramatic turn following the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, from the neighbouring Cité du Chêne-Pointu in Clichy‑sous‑Bois – also a Zehrfuss urban layout. Chased by the police, the youngsters hid inside an electrical substation where they were electrocuted, and weeks of riots ensued. Covered by the media the world over, Clichy-Montfermeil became the subject of intense debates over how to remedy the appalling conditions of the estates. The Plan Borloo announced in 2003 with the creation of the Agence Nationale pour la Rénovation Urbaine (ANRU) was fast forwarded. In January 2007, then housing minister Jean-Louis Borloo came to Les Bosquets to launch the first of the grand projet de rénovation urbaine (PRU) for Clichy-Montfermeil, which started with a massive demolition programme of the Zehrfuss buildings, the necessary precursor to the renovation project. It spanned more than a decade and the last tower was demolished in 2020. It was – and still is – the largest urban renovation programme in France, and it took a tragedy for it to happen.

‘Wesh Wesh conveys a sense of claustrophobia, a world from which it is difficult to escape’

If Wesh Wesh shows Les Bosquets as it was back then, the setting for a tragedy about to happen, Les Misérables, shot nearly 20 years later, hints at unresolved social issues and police brutality despite the vastly improved urban environment, including the Paris T4 tram-train line finally reaching Montfermeil in 2019. But the film has to be read within the context of Ladj Ly’s personal experience. Using his camera as a weapon, as immortalised in a 2004 portrait by the photographer JR, he filmed Les Bosquets before, during and after the riots, resulting in the release of 365 Jours à Clichy-Montfermeil on DVD in 2006. Inspired by the copwatch movement, which stemmed from the Rodney King beating in 1991, he became Les Bosquets’s ‘unofficial copwatcher’. As such, he videoed a violent incident that resulted in several police officers being relieved of their duties in 2008. Under intense pressure from the police, Ly kept filming as his only means of defence. In Les Misérables, the drone capturing the shooting of Issa by the police is clearly inspired by this experience – and although aesthetically close to Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), an acknowledged influence, it sets it apart, as Kassovitz was an outsider. 

But the film that probably best represents Montfermeil as it is now, and might be in the future, is Merveilles à Montfermeil, also released in 2019, and directed by Jeanne Balibar, who appears at the start of Les Misérables as a flirty police commissioner. She too is an outsider and credits Ly for facilitating the filming in Montfermeil and Les Bosquets, but unlike universally acclaimed Les Misérables (Cannes Jury Prize, among others), Balibar’s film was panned by most critics despite a formidable cast of actors: Emmanuelle Béart, Ramzy Bedia, Mathieu Amalric, Balibar herself and many others. As the story goes, the new mayor of Montfermeil (Emmanuelle Béart) has been elected on a dream-like experimental ticket that includes relaxation and breathing workshops, compulsory siesta times for all, the installation of toits maraîchers – cultivated gardens on the newly renovated Zehrfuss roofs – the creation of the Montfermeil international language school to promote diversity, as well as special days when residents have to wear kimonos and kilts. It’s a clear utopia delivered with the sort of Brechtian distanciation usually associated with Jacques Rivette’s films, the antithesis of the fast-paced Les Misérables. And yet through a series of tableaux, we get a good sense of the refurbished Les Bosquets. Vincen Cornu, the architect in charge of the renovation and construction, would have been pleased. Bondy Forest, now largely open to the public, is the key setting for the summer Fête de la Brioche – and the centre of Montfermeil, complete with the arrival of the tram, plays itself. Curiously, Balibar says that, apart from the international language school, all the new mayor’s initiatives actually exist somewhere in various municipalities in Seine-Saint-Denis, including the Fête de la Brioche, a key social event in the Montfermeil calendar.

Merveilles à Montfermeil, released in the same year as Les Misérables, follows a new mayor of Montfermeil as she announces ambitious new policies

This included an annual summer festival, La Fête de la Brioche and compulsory siestas

According to Balibar, many of the fictional mayor's initiatives have in fact been implemented across Seine-Saint-Denis

Most intriguing in the film is the constant appearance on the mayor’s computer screen of Montfermeil’s animated urban renovation plans that she struggles to interpret. The Grand Paris Express, that will see Les Bosquets sited on ligne 16 of the Métro, planned for 2030, is occasionally evoked with equal puzzlement. There is mention of the Ateliers Médicis – an outpost of Rome’s Villa Medici in Clichy-Montfermeil – again a real project, launched in 2012 by Frédéric Mitterrand, then minister of culture. Balibar juggles whimsically between utopia and reality and Merveilles à Montfermeil can be construed as a vehicle for reflection on the future of Montfermeil. It is generous in its outlook, especially in the treatment of mixing between Black, white and Brown people – a perennial problem in the historically segregated banlieues – pictured dancing together at the Fête de la Brioche. 

Since 2005, Les Bosquets has been transformed by the urban renovation programme as well as the arts. The brand power of the Villa Medici attracts a wide range of local and international artists and hosts Ladj Ly’s film school, École Kourtrajmé, free to all, which is about to produce its second cohort. As for the Grand Paris Express, it appears to be on track, and Barcelona practice EMBT are designing the new Métro station in Les Bosquets. One can only hope that Wesh Wesh, Les Misérables and Merveilles à Montfermeil have all been part of their briefing. Film provides an accelerated education for complex situations – and Montfermeil is certainly one.