Divines (2016)

Houda Benyamina's Divines arrives from the Parisian banlieue with a stolen handbag and a mean streak, and it wastes no time apologizing for either. Dounia and Maimouna are teenage girls who shoplift, resell, and dream of climbing the drug trade's greasy ladder under the wing of a dealer named Rebecca. Benyamina shoots it all with a restless, handheld energy that owes as much to Scorsese as to the housing projects she grew up in. The film took the Camera d'Or at Cannes, which tells us something about what the festival circuit prizes, though it prizes this one for sound reasons.

The casting deserves a pause, if pausing is your business. The leads are French-Maghrebi and Black actresses, and the banlieue is populated by people who plausibly live there. This is representation as a matter of arithmetic and lived fact, not a casting memo. The film is also, in its bones, a story about two young women who refuse the receptionist-track future handed to them by a school system that has already written them off. Their loyalty to each other is the engine of the plot. Benyamina never stops to announce the thesis. She lets the friendship carry the weight.

Where the film earns its keep is in what it declines to do. Poverty, the drug economy, a wealthy man hoarding cash in an apartment: all present, all treated as weather instead of sermon. The state's abandonment of the neighborhood registers in a single devastating image, firemen standing outside a burning building because they will not enter without riot police, yet the film does not turn to the camera to explain itself. There is no lecture. There is a girl begging men to save her friend, and there is fire. Divines understands that the most effective argument is the one never made out loud.