Thomas Kruithof illuminates the political action by following the fight of a mayor embodied by the comedian and his chief of staff, Reda Kateb.
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One of the first sequences of promises we plant in full shipwreck. Courses and flooded bearings, streaming ceilings, men and women writing to master the disaster with the means of the edge (brooms, buckets, moppers). The piping dropped, the liner takes the water, ready to sink. The liner: In reality, a building bar of the Cité des Bernardins, located in the Paris suburbs, which constitutes both the anchoring point and the stake of Thomas Kruithof’s second feature film. The node of the war that occupies each of the characters, determines their actions, and from which their personality is defined.
In the first place, the mayor of the suburbs in question, Clemence (Isabelle Huppert), who, after two mandates, is preparing to give way to his first assistant (Naidra Ayadi) and, no doubt, to leave definitively politics. Decision taken without remorse or regret, provided you win his last fight: to obtain, for the Bernardins and his three thousand dwellings, the grant of sixty-three million that plans to allocate the state to one of the unhealthy cities of the great Paris. Clemence made this promise to his administered, she wishes to hold her word. It enjoys a valuable help in the person of Yazid (Reda Kateb), his ambitious chief of cabinet, who, from the city, knows all the residents.
Elected in connection with the real
side by side, bound by a long-standing complicity and a mutual esteem, the mayor and his right arm lead the battle on the ground and in the offices of the Elysée. The latter provides the film a complex, biting and purely political material to which the filmmaker and his screenwriter Jean-Baptiste Delafon (co-author with Eric Benzekri from the Canal + Baron Series Noir, 2016) have conceded nothing. Not even some scenes likely to inform us about the past of the characters. The promises remains faithful to the narrative line that commands its purpose: to show the way the local power is exercised. Subject which stages elected officials with the real, close to the inhabitants and their concerns, forced to dial with the best (the associative fabric) as the worst (the sleeping merchants) and to restore confidence when any fuss the Camp.
It is to this human material that the film rubs and restores by the concrete. The action of elected officials but also that of men and women fighting, day-to-day, to save their accommodation and get decent living conditions. Whether they are homeowners who have saved all their existence to buy an apartment that, today, is worthless or just tenants. Some, grouped in association, decide not to pay their charges as long as the premises are not renovated. While, for their part, sleep merchants enrich themselves by renting the poorest (including asylum seekers) unhealthy spaces.
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