"Kings", or when the director misses his second movie

Cinema

Deniz Gamze Ergüven misses his second film, in the midst of the LA riots in 1992.

Spring 1992: In Los Angeles, the tension rises in South Central, while the verdict of the police officers' trial (white ) who beat Rodney King, an African-American driver. On April 12, another verdict fell, acquitting a Korean grocer who slaughtered an African-American teenager in the back.

In this explosive environment, Millie (Halle Berry) collects orphans, infants, or pubesters, whose parents were caught in the violence and the prison world. The eldest, Jesse (Lamar Johnson), helps him as best he can – he brings back Nicole, a runaway teenager on the threshold of drift.

Revealed with "Mustang", in 2015 (two Caesar), Deniz Gamze Ergüven is exceeded by its subject, all the more delicate as its foundation – racial violence – still tugs the United States: the "Six Days" (title of an edifying novel by Ryan Gattis to reread) of LA haunt the unconscious collective, whenever an African-American is shot dead by police officers. The Frenchwoman of Turkish origin, as commendable as her intentions, was advancing on mined ground. On arrival, the best meets the worst in "Kings", but the last occult first.

First stumbling block: a laborious exhibition, repeating ad nauseam archive footage of the beatings of Rodney King. To announce the disaster ahead, the director splits a clumsy composite plan, superimposing an aerial view of South Central lava flows, a metaphor supported by the volcano that will explode … Ergüven then slips life slices of the surrounding urban reality. We think back to Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing" (released in 1989, premonitory of the events of 1992), the polyphony of "Short Cuts" by Robert Altman (1993) or "Crash" by Paul Haggis (2004). The sense of déjà-vu is counterproductive, in addition to the post-"The Wire" or "Atlanta" era.

Second pitfall: the outbreak of violence (six days, which last only 48 hours, 2300 wounded, 55 dead, $ 1 billion worth of damage) comes down to two long intertwined sequences: a couple handcuffed in a parking lot and three teens fleeing in a convertible. Between the first, which flirts with the "romcom", and the second, dramatic but artificially smoky, the rupture of tone is trivial, almost displaced.

Then comes the third pitfall: summary characters. Nothing is known about the sources of Millie's self-denial. Teens, they are monolithic, each reduced to a function (the good, the beautiful and the trickster). As for the neighbor, one characteristic hunt the other (writer, alcoholic, music lover, excited shotgun, babysitter, slugger, MacGyver street lamp …) without illuminating its status as "only white ghetto". When he crosses like a charm the fury of the racial riot, without the mouth of Daniel Aryan Daniel Craig emanates no one, we are not surprised any more than anything … Except that the director of "Mustang "(four Caesar …) was able to commit such an uneven and inconsistent film on such a subject.A.Lo.

Director : Deniz Gamze Ergüven. With Halle Berry, Daniel Craig, .. 1h32