De shit et d’air pur

A young suburbanite performs his Work of General Interest on a farm.

With a pared-down and raw style, which restraint respects the reserve of a character, unwilling to show what he’s made of, this movie meddles in the daily toil that justice has imposed to this young, cheeky, rap lover, man. The point here is not to depict the cultural shock, as the title suggests it with humor, but to use the topic of the uprooting to highlight the enclosing of the young suburbanites. Focused on Hassan, the camera shows every facets of his sensitive self, his good and bad sides, in a rigorous and ojective portrait, rejecting all manichaeism (everyone gets a chance to talk whether it’s Hassan’s stooges or his educators). The director manages to make her character endearing, to seize his complexity in just one sketch, penetrating the cold realism of flamboyant scenes.