Contemporary Paris.

Metro stations.

Anonymous boys, fixed gazes, expressionless, restless, somber, mute.

They aggregate and disintegrate like cells gone mad as they toss cell phones with which they have photographed common spaces.

They talk about HSBC and the drastic reduction of staff; about Nixon, Pinochet and the French Revolution while Berlioz's great funeral and triumphant symphony plays.

A student has an appointment with a minister who sends greetings to his father; a girl devotes herself to gilding the statue of Joan of Arc; another opens cars in front of the Paris Stock Exchange and sits there for a few minutes; others share the floors of the La Defense skyscraper.

A banker is shot by Greg, but Fred, too, one of them is shot by a colleague.

Semtex blows up all these locations as they converge in the evening to an upscale department store.

Here everything is planned, security eliminated, cameras defused, and scheduled to stay until the next morning when they return home.

TVs in the upscale mall show the first images of the attacks still unclaimed by anyone.

The boys wander dazed, in a state of confusion amid feelings of anguish, attempts to escape their own presence, through games of music, food, life and death in an environment in which the most extreme branding signs capitalist material ostentation.

While the symbols of political and financial power have been attacked, the mall becomes their home for a night, a far from sober home in which the gothic, funereal and poignant verses of MY WAY are sung in a grotesque tone.

Some of them, they are still very determined and lucid; they seem immune to the doubts that " have spat in the face of the stories of those who kneel"; others smell death.

Some try to justify their actions by claiming the epicness of their actions: after all, even donkeys in Iraq refused to walk through mine-filled fields, which is why children were used as an alternative.

The terrorists who allegedly carried out these acts must be considered PUBLIC ENEMIES, the latest TV releases recite; therefore, the identity qualification of such criminals becomes a symbol of a frontal opposition to the established legal-political order.

This legitimizes the right to consider no longer as a person but as a mere source of danger the absolute enemy, the INIUSTUS HOSTIS, which must therefore be neutralized in the name of collective security through measures of exception.

Here is the exceptionality of the twist this film takes: moral obligation lies in the inevitability of reaction.

It is necessary to brand the opposing party as criminal and inhuman, as an absolute NON-value; the logic of value and disvalue unfolds all its devastating consequentiality and compels the creation of ever new and deeper discrimination, criminalization and devaluation until the annihilation of all life unworthy of existence.

This legitimizes any reaction by honoring and celebrating it not only as good and just but above all by placing it on a meta-value plane.

Therefore, the question will no longer be why, what, may have been the genealogical motive for any alleged attack on power but only the answer will determine the elimination of the embarrassment of the question so specious and unbearably partisan.

That is why these boys so naively criminal, victims executioners of a engulfing system choose as their temporary abode a shopping mall in which they become merchandise without a brand, therefore pure fetishism of value aspects dictated by that profit taking advantage of claims to use to their own advantage.

The film was not admitted to the Cannes Film Festival and received no recognition from the economics of distribution either.

If the "monster" is at home and the enemy at home then the mechanism of removal is the only salvation.

The film unveils, with sophisticated artistic mystery, that all values are regulated by the market masquerading as an invisible metaphysical entity that heavily affects lives without the most organized rebellion scratching it in the slightest.

On the contrary, the outcome is that of the instrumentalization of pseudo-rebellion: globalization absorbs into itself in the meshes of the economy even the nostalgic struggle between the servant and the master who no longer have a way to oppose each other but only to ally themselves in order to stay on that market that no one now challenges as if it were a law of nature.

Being is too complicated, although there are sporadic attempts, and the epic action that these boys confusingly imagine they have accomplished highlights their "exposure," their "being placed outside," that is, the fact that their identity does not belong to them because it is in another place, in what will be seen and said or not said about them.

What seems to possess them is violence as a dastardly scream of identity in the face of unbearable anonymity: such a choice or attempt at rebellion turns out to be nothing more than the most accurate expropriation of one's identity; a radical alienation that has lost all trace of self.

A violent depiction of the current "cultural" industry; a disturbing fresco of our contemporaneity.

"Where are we going?" asks Kerouac in ON THE ROAD.

"I don't know, but we have to go."

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice