January 28, 2005, 11:11 Culture

Gang of prisoners
hip-hoppers

Ivan Kulikov The Thirteenth District, another creation of French cinema, directed by Luc Besson, was released. Gangster cyberpunk about the gangster ghetto of Paris 2013 demonstrates the considerable production sense of a former diver.

Now, if you are invited to a fresh French action movie, you can bet that the producer will be Luc Besson, the author of the idea will be Besson, and the director will be an unknown young talent hired by Besson in the vast ghetto of music video directors and hack TV series producers. All together guarantees an hour and a half of energetic stunts, cold acting skills and sketchy intrigue that leaves adrenaline dormant in the back of the pituitary gland.

Luc Besson, a former good director and now the most successful film manufacturer in France, is obscenely productive, depressingly predictable and commercially successful. Besson . has an excellent business plan, and they say that national cinema relies on such films, but there really is no special passion for holding on to such cinema In his latest projects, Besson reached some esoteric heights of unbridled monotony, managing to outrage not only his past benefit performances (the idiotic American remake of Taxi), but even others (the soulless Crimson Rivers 2), and in Michel Vaillant making the spectators something like optical devices for monitoring Formula 1.

In “The 13th District” Besson is also present in all his signature torments of the mastermind, financier, leader, but, perhaps, this is the first example when the producer dictatorship, having completely raped the golden calf of the box office, finally hits the bottom in its fall from grace and begins move in the opposite direction.

She is also pushed there by angry citizens from the Parisian streets, whom Besson invited to play a futuristic action in the 13th district - the gangster ghetto of Paris in the near future (the film takes place in 2013).

This is David Belle , the leading actor, one of the founding fathers of "parkour", an extreme street stunt sport that originated in the depths of the Parisian hip-hop culture of the 80s. Belle plays a character named Leitha, a streetwise Gavroche who helps the cool opera Damien get to the local brother (and part-time scriptwriter Bibi Naceri) in order to deactivate the atomic bomb that the government is holding against him. Damien is also no slouch: this is Cyril Raffaeli, a feature actor, a brilliant stuntman, who jumped in a cassock on the Parisian rooftops as a priest-killer in “Crimson Rivers 2”, and in “The Deadly Kiss of the Dragon” gave an exemplary thrashing to Jet Li.

You can get the brother only by a fair amount of jumping on the roofs of ruined high-rise buildings with acrobatic aerobatics absolutely in the spirit of “The Matrix”, but with a big allowance for the switched off computer and the residential areas of Bucharest, where the filming took place (in France, permits for such tricks without insurance are no longer issued). Cyberpunk, but the role of a magic electronic wand inserted into the main character’s brain is performed here by the real muscular efforts of acrobat actors: in the language of the streets - “parkour”, and in application to cinema and the genre - acropunk, if you like.

Or acroconfuist punk with elements of social dystopia (where would we be without it in French science fiction cinema) - that’s what “District 13” is.

Let's give credit to Besson, who has not yet lost his sense of production: he absolutely tapped into the audience's accumulated irritation from all these flying Neos, delayed bullets (one, however, found its way into the "13th district", but this is progress!) and frigid gymnasts in latex: the viewer doesn’t need this, he’s already yearning for the savory slaps and noisy self-mutilation from Hong Kong Con-Fu. In “District 13,” despite the mathematically calculated acrobatics and some rudiments of cold Bessonian action, this healthy popular reaction to “The Matrix” is clearly discernible: there is hooligan courage and drive with the smell of sweat, the invigorating chaos of the streets, leaked with an electrofunk soundtrack, flamboyant black gentlemen and extras dressed like a gang of captured hip-hoppers.

You can join the popular protest today in almost all cinemas in Moscow.

Gang of prisoners hip-hoppers

Gang of prisoners
hip-hoppers

Gang of captured hip-hoppers