The scars of colonialism are far from healed all over the world, yet it’s easy to forget that some of the most protracted struggles have occurred in remote regions of Europe. Just as Britain formerly used Ireland as a laboratory for colonial policies, one of France’s most fractious territories is its closest to home; Corsica, just ninety minutes from Paris by plane.
In his second feature, “A Violent Life,” Corsican-born director Thierry de Peretti portrays the nationalist violence that gripped his homeland in the 1990s, trying to untangle the murky nexus of crime, state power, and revolutionary groups that fought for control. For the uninitiated, the plot might be too murky at first, due to the highly specific political debates, but this complexity also elevates “A Violent Life” from being another atmospheric crime story to being a valuable document of political struggle. Whether or not one understands every detail, the overall story is clear – how broken politics can inexorably pull otherwise promising young people into violence and despair.
De Peretti opens “A Violent Life” with title cards to give context; the nationalist group FLNC originated in the 1970s to advocate home rule, but it internally fractured in the 1990s, inaugurating a more violent era in which temporary alliances arose between the mafia and both sides of the political struggle. Next, the protagonist Stephane (Jean Michelangeli) is enjoying student life in Paris until a phone call alerts him to the murder of his best friend and places the blame on his shoulders. He ignores a similar threat to his life to return to Corsica for the funeral and the film’s remainder is a flashback showing how this young intellectual was drawn into violence.
Viewers might sense a similarity in Stephane’s journey home to Michael Corleone’s trip to Sicily in “The Godfather.” He’s traveling out of modernity to a remote, rural region still in thrall to older, more violent codes of life and loyalty and as with Corleone, the cerebral Stephane seems more impassioned and at home in this wilder territory.
Apolitical at first, Stephane half-heartedly studies while looking for something more fulfilling in his life when some old friends ask him to transport some guns. After agreeing almost casually, he is immediately arrested and in prison, he meets nationalists who teach him the radical political theory that they live by, giving him the intellectual framework for life that he never found in school.
On his release, thoroughly shorn of innocence, he connects the youthful criminals of his childhood with the nationalists he met in prison, putting them on a collision course with the most violent groups on the island. Soon, Stephane and his friends are engaged in a campaign of violence against foreign property owners and others deemed enemies of the cause, but the group is frequently divided by debates over tactics and how much criminality the ends justify.
De Peretti may try the patience of some viewers with prolonged scenes of such political debate, yet history shows that the fate of rebellions often turns on such internal disagreements and that successful rebellions usually have some sort of shared vision of the future to implement. However, these didactic scenes are balanced out by some terrifically atmospheric scenes that give emotional resonance to the rhetoric. For instance, one montage of red-hued, handheld footage of street violence set to driving dance-pop immerses the viewer in the invigorating revolutionary fervor the young men feel at the time. Yet this fervor is completely deflated by the chillingly impersonal long shot at the very beginning showing the killing of Stephane’s friend Christophe (repeated at the end to act as thematic bookends to the story).
Another excellent scene juxtaposes an audio track of Stephane reading from Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth,” nobly extolling the justifications of anti-colonial violence while a political murder is planned. Few directors since Godard have displayed such a potent use of dialectic between sound and image to create a more complex meaning; in showing the ugly intersection of rhetoric and reality, this scene encapsulates the whole film.
Modern pop culture is replete with stories of rebellion, or at least reductive, ersatz versions of it, yet few films have the courage and intelligence to show the incredibly messy reality of attempting to replace an entrenched modern government. The complexity of “A Violent Life” will be difficult for many viewers, but this true-to-life moral intricacy is also what makes it such a valuable portrait of Corsica. Thierry de Peretti is a talent to watch, blending a thoroughly observed, naturalistic sense of place with a capacity for vividly emotional scenes. [B+]