Drama about a humble French neighborhood directed by Ladj Ly with a very correct Anta Diaw, who plays an activist who, fed up with bureaucratic constraints, decides to change things from within.
By Ricardo Rosado
For Frames
The fight of Ladj Ly to demonstrate the failure of State Through the forced resilience of the most disadvantaged it continues to work, but the Frenchman now also faces the inevitable comparison of his new work with the success of the previous one. In this battle, he has changed the electrifying magnetism and force of ‘The Miserables’ for the drama of ‘The Undesirables’a story that is still attractive for what it tells, but that does not end up doing so in a truly remarkable way.
Its colorful beginning, a scene that links the tragedy of a community that has to take its dead down the stairs of the block with the sudden death of a mayor in the middle of the demolition of a building, marks the thick line of a title that wins by relying in Anta Diaw, the actress who plays a young activist who, tired of enduring the evils of a bureaucracy that only seeks to make her uncomfortable, decides to fix things from within. Her story, intertwined with that of a new mayor who finds himself turned into a sadly realistic caricature, does not manage to go very far in a film that does not dare to detach itself from its premise.
To remember that these other realities continue in ours.
