At the box office “King of the Streets” by Elias Belkeddar

Elias Belkeddar’s film “King of the Streets” (Omar La Fraise) is for some reason annotated as a comedy, albeit a criminal one. Mikhail Trofimenkov For a long time he has no illusions about the state of the once brilliant French noir, but the film about two criminal relocants plunged him into painful despondency.

In French, the word la fraise means both “drill” and “strawberry”. Throughout the film, the viewer is offered several versions of how Omar (Reda Kateb), one of the two main characters, acquired such an ambiguous chauffeur.

According to one of them, he is just a kid, clear and corrosive, like a drill: what he wants, he will achieve. According to another, one teacher slapped the little Omar in the face, and the next day he treated him, in order to apologize, with peaches stuffed with fragments of a drill. According to the third, young Omar drilled a hole in a fruit merchant’s van to steal strawberries for the poor boys of his Parisian suburb. In fact, the truth, as the viewer will see in the finale, is much more terrible, but by that time Belkeddar will make such an effort to arouse empathy for his hero that any fanaticism should get away with Omar.

Well, those who started with peaches and strawberries will inevitably end up with raids on cash-in-transit vehicles and the industrial-scale cocaine trade. Omar will get his twenty years of high security, but French justice is slow. By the time the verdict is announced, he will not only run away to his historical homeland, which the child of Parisian sidewalks saw in a coffin, but will also naturalize there. And Algeria, which is your Israel, does not betray its own.

Not so much out of a sense of camaraderie, but fearing an equally fierce deadline, Omar will be followed by his all-water sidekick of pure Gallic blood, Roger (Benoît Magimel). Having learned that he was acquitted for lack of evidence of the crime, he, however, will not leave his partner and will not return to Paris, but will stay with him in a luxurious villa on the Mediterranean coast. It would be better if he returned: then the audience would not have to suffer from an unintelligible movie compote of blood, cocaine, oversweetened tea and equally oversweetened Algerian Mouzon, snake venom with lemon juice and sugar snot.

One of the scriptural pillars of French – and now Franco-Arabic – noir has always been the motif of chivalrous gangster friendship. The friendship between Omar and Roger is an attempt to revive this mythology. Omar is a sloppy and unkempt gopnik prone to psychopathic antics. Roger is a solid, economic jock. The sunken Benoit Magimel constantly “turns on Robert De Niro”, despising the great national tradition of Jean Gabin or Lino Ventura, who are similar in psychotype to him.

From such a duet, under the assumed circumstances, material of any genre nature can be squeezed out. Belkeddar tried to use all the dramatic registers at once, which no one has ever succeeded in doing. It didn’t work for him either.

The initial episodes are responsible for the comedic component, reminiscent of a marriage fished out of Tarantino’s wastebasket. The heroes cunningly take possession of a bag of cocaine in the street mess of two gangs and, having smoked, drunk and sniffed in their villa, amuse themselves like small children.

Belkeddar dilutes criminal humor with the motif of longing for the French homeland, mixed, however, for quite pragmatic reasons. Indeed, what are these citizens of the world to do in beautiful Algeria: money, like powder, tends to run out. Omar has to go to work. No, no, God forbid, not to a construction team, but a “roof” and a nominal director of a confectionery factory. It is here that the film is covered with a wave of sentimentality so inappropriate that it makes you feel almost pornographic awkwardness. Omar falls in love with factory administrator Samia (Meryem Amiyar), so proud and independent that she once ran away from her pathetic wedding. Samia gives Omar a crash course in feminism, after which he transforms from a wolfhound into a pure poodle.

The strength of their feelings is illustrated by the camel racing scene of lovers, which cannot be regarded otherwise than as a hidden advertisement of the Algerian tourist business. And the sentimental note is strengthened, according to the intention of the authors, by the storyline of a gang of homeless boys whom Omar takes under guardianship.

To be honest, there is nothing touching in these street angels armed with butcher’s knives and samurai swords: the kids are completely finished ghouls. Yes, of course, the vile life is to blame for everything, but social medicine is already useless here. The same applies, however, to Omar and Roger: why on earth should the audience sympathize with these pale non-humans, no matter how nostalgic for Saint-Denis they may experience.