The director Audrey Estrougo narrowly restores the emergence of the iconic group of the 1990s.
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There is a virtually inevitable pitfall for whom a biopic undertakes: that of stiffening his subject, to get him into force in a narrative too narrow for him. In short, observing with a retrospective look a story that was lived with innocence, improvisation, ignorance of what will come. This trap of the reconstitution is even more threatening when it comes to bringing into a film a phenomenon as feverish as the emergence of the French hip-hop movement, and the deflating that was the appearance of the Supreme NTM group in the Musical landscape in the late 1980s.
The Audrey Estrougo filmmaker responded to the challenge of such a project by a suite of sound choices. Already, the one who is to stick to the current period from 1989 to 1992, or from the birth of NTM in a suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis until the release of their first album authentik and their first media steps. In the beginning was therefore this band of thirty young artists, first dancers and graffitiores. Then NTM finally tightens on three of its members, Kool Shen, Joeystarr and DJ S, who will free himself from the overwhelming shade of their American model to embark on a specifically French rap who pours into his tubes the fury of the Untilfully invisible or caricatured suburban youth.
What the film documents very well, it is the way in which the emergence of the group goes hand in hand with that of a political conscience: that of a rap becoming both a way of becoming aware of self and to finally exist in the eyes of a society. Street corners at Bordelic concerts in the MJC, this intuition is consolidating around the duo Kool Shen-Joeystarr, superbly embodied by the two young Sandor Funtik actors and Théo Christine who, while avoiding the mechanical imitation of their models, bring out. a very strong fraternity between their characters.
Collective fever
At regular intervals, supreme their household of small parentheses of intimacy that report on the synergy at work between two icons in the making, the way the duo takes in hand his destiny and his crazy talent. In a very beautiful scene, we see NTM record for the first time in studio and the duo spread the roles: joeystarr obeys a pure principle of chaos, while Kool Shen tries to channel the energy of the group, explaining to his acolyte. The importance of this album, only opportunity available to them to extricate from their social condition. Rather than talking about political consciousness, it would be more important to talk about energy, which seems to be the real subject of Audrey Estrougo, less likely to fetish a time than to follow the collective fever who is prepared to contaminate all the youth of a country and that it superbly captures in all concert scenes.
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