Sortir de la banlieue: (re)articulations of national and gender identities in Zaida Ghorab-Volta's Jeunesse Doree

This article explores the constructions of urban space, national identity and gender mediated by an important genre of contemporary French cinema, the film de banlieue. Over the last 20 years, films by both French and French-Maghrebi filmmakers determined to show the reality of life on the outskirts of France's major cities have paradoxically helped reinforce notions of the grands ensembles as places outside the mainstream of culture and identity. In her movie Jeunesse Doree (2002), filmmaker Zaida Ghorab-Volta uses the simple narrative of a road trip made by two young working-class women around France photographing these ensembles to subvert various forms of discursive emplacement that have resulted from the convergence between inhuman built environments and filmic representations of those environments that exploit ethnic difference and glamorize masculine violence. Although the film recognizes the incarcerative nature of these modernist neighbourhoods for women, it does not mediate a simplistic rejection of the banlieu. Instead, Jeunesse Doree proposes a working class solidarity that cuts across place, race and gender, and a relationship between (urban) modernity and (geographical) citizenship that reworks mainstream French ways of thinking about urban culture and the space of nationhood. The young women's project of 'framing modernity' also works within the film as a mise en abyme, recuperating high modernist theories of mediated vision as a primary link between cities and their hinterlands.