Contemporary French cinema and the langue de passage : From Dheepan to Welcome

Introduction

In the corridor of a banlieue primary school, a French child asks her new classmate her age. The Sri Lankan newcomer holds up nine fingers. The French girl explains: ‘neuf ans’, and the Sri Lankan one repeats the words back to her. ‘Neuf ans’. In a Calais apartment, two Kurdish migrants share a meal with their French host. The characters navigate a stilted conversation in English, the more fluent guest translating his friend’s words from Kurdish. As they finish, the guests make a brief but symbolic foray into their host’s language: ‘Merci’. As a French maid hands over her job to her Tamil replacement, she explains she must always knock on the living room door before entering. ‘Là, tu frappes si t’as besoin de quelque chose. Et eux, ils te disent “entrez”. Tu comprends?’ She mimes a knock (‘la porte – toc toc’); the latter clarifies in English, ‘Knock the door’? Her counterpart responds in kind: ‘Yes’.

Since the early days of French film, language has been used to bolster conceptions of national identity, and to articulate and reinforce what Ginette Vincendeau calls ‘the Frenchness of French cinema’ (2010: 338). Yet as multilingualism has become increasingly prominent in film, the place and representation of the French language has begun to shift. Having once occupied a hegemonic position as the sole language of value in most films, French is being increasingly decentred to make way for a multitude of other languages, ranging from rival lingua francas such as English to regional languages such as Corsican and the languages of former French colonies, such as Arabic, Wolof and Bambara. In these films, language learning expands characters’ skill sets and opens up possibilities for accessing new forms of knowledge and control. Such films question the dominance of the French language, bringing a multitude of different languages into play on the French screen. Many such films are co-productions and incorporate not only other languages, but cast, crew, source texts, narratives, themes, funding and shooting locations from beyond the Hexagon.

In Dheepan (2015, Jacques Audiard) and Welcome (2009, Philippe Lioret), effects of (post)colonialism, immigration, and globalisation transform French spaces into multicultural ones, in which language use is impacted by a complex network of spheres of influence. Both these films depict characters migrating from the ‘East’ (Sri Lanka in Dheepan and Kurdistan in Welcome), who find themselves trapped in precarious positions in urban France. Yet unlike most French films about immigration, in which the migrant travels from the Maghreb or another former French colony to settle in France permanently, the protagonists of Dheepan and Welcome ultimately aim to settle elsewhere: the UK. The English, French, Kurdish and Tamil-speaking protagonists of Dheepan and Welcome, and the French characters they encounter during their time in France, occupy a multilingual landscape characterised by a multitude of identities, histories and trajectories. As a result, these films resituate discourse on language and identity in French cinema in a polycentric context responsive to the world within, across and beyond French borders. In these films, the protagonists’ experience on French soil is only temporary, and French is not the language of their new home, nor one spoken in their country of origin, but a language of fleeting and conditional value.

This article offers a new approach to understanding the place of language in contemporary French films about immigration, globalisation and border-crossing in today’s Europe. It paraphrases terminology from Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet to analyse the multilingual films Dheepan and Welcome. These films’ depiction of language learning and use sits in stark contrast to more traditional depictions of migrants and refugees in French cinema, such as in Yamina Benguigui’s Inch’Allah Dimanche (2001) or Claire Denis’s 35 rhums (2008). In those films, migrant characters must learn French in order to assimilate into their long-term, if not permanent, host society. Indeed, the maternal characters in films such as Benguigui’s Inch’Allah Dimanche and Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s Wesh wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passe? (2001), monolingual Arabic speakers who are consequently confined to the home, highlight the disadvantage and alienation experienced by those denied the opportunity to learn French after migrating to France. In Dheepan and Welcome, however, language learning and language use operate along decreasingly hierarchical or neo-colonial lines. This article analyses how French co-exists alongside other languages such as English, Kurdish and Tamil in these films, and proposes a new term for understanding the use of language by shifting and migrating subjects: the langue de passage.

Migration and multilingualism in film

Linguistic difference, from regional French dialects to ‘foreign’ languages, has been an element of French cinema since the early 1930s. In particular, Jean Renoir’s 1937 inter-war film La Grande Illusion represents not only the French language, but dialogue in English, German, Russian and even a word or two of Latin. Throughout the twentieth century, multilingual films appeared every few years, with some numbering seven languages or more: for example, Henri-George Clouzot’s 1953 Le Salaire de la peur features dialogue in English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish. Yet while linguistic variety is not new to French cinema, very few twentieth-century films recognise the inherent potential for power wielded by multilinguals in monolingual environments, and almost none foreground the potential uses of non-Western tongues. For the most part, multilingual French cinema of the twentieth century speaks in the languages of Western Europe, and silences languages from beyond. Julien Duvivier’s 1937 Pépé le Moko, which is set entirely in Morocco but which limits Arabic to unsubtitled background chatter and represents no Berber languages at all, is a revealing example of this trend. ¹

Yet many contemporary French multilingual films, released from approximately 2005 onwards, revise the role language plays in scenarios depicting migration towards, through or away from France (see King, 2017). As Yasemin Yildiz writes, ‘increased migration and mobility, the advance of communication technologies, and the spread of media have also contributed to the sense that multiple languages coexist and interact in new constellations’ (2011: 3). Within such ‘constellations’, multilingual cinema, especially in France, has arisen as an important cultural force concerned with the politics of multilingualism. From the cinema of Franco-Maghrebin filmmakers like Rachid Bouchareb and Abdellatif Kechiche, to that of white French postcolonial subjects such as Claire Denis, to Paris-born filmmakers of mainstream French cultural background like Jacques Audiard, many contemporary French films not only incorporate a large proportion of non-French dialogue, but foreground the multilingual nature of the contemporary French (and global) space, and recognise the value of knowing and using multiple languages in both the private and the public spheres. Of course, the French language remains very important in French films. But for practically the first time, even the most historically maligned or dominated linguistic groups are also being foregrounded. Indeed, as Maud Ceuterick explains in her analysis of Welcome, ‘these films “advocate for a non-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism”’ (2014: 79).

In stark contrast to the hierarchical representation, or complete erasure, of language difference in most French cinema of the twentieth century, the characters of these contemporary films use language to counteract and dismantle traditional understandings of what it means to master language, and what it means to have and use social power in contemporary France. Multiple films depict cross-continental road journeys, such as Tony Gatlif’s 2004 Exils and Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Le Grand Voyage of the same year. In these films, characters of mixed Franco-Maghrebin descent (including beurs and pieds-noirs) embark on physical and spiritual journeys across international Mediterranean spaces in search of answers to questions they have long harboured about their culturally hybrid identities. These characters must adapt linguistically as they travel along physical and symbolic pathways, and slip between Arabic, English, French and even improvised codes like mime to navigate their way across translingual landscapes. As Michael Gott writes in his book on French-language road cinema, ‘for French directors the road format offers the possibility of elaborating flexible, transnational and multicultural alternatives to a monolithic vision of France’ (2016: 4).

Other films, such as Aki Kaurismäki’s 2011 Le Havre, depict south-to-north migrant trajectories from former French colonies to Europe. Yet Kaurismäki’s migrant protagonist Idrissa arrives in the port city of Le Havre by accident, as the shipping container he has stowed away in from Gabon is accidentally rerouted from its intended destination of London. Such a trajectory thus troubles the notion that francophone African migrants only attempt to migrate to the Hexagon. While the French language remains important, these migratory patterns decentre metropolitan France from its historical position as a destination all such migrants inevitably wish to reach. In the case of Le Havre, this positioning is only heightened by the fact that Finnish director Kaurismäki had initially planned to situate the film in a Mediterranean city in Italy or Spain, but ultimately decided on Le Havre after ‘com[ing] close to giving up’ on finding the right setting (Von Bagh, 2011: 38).

These migration trajectories challenge typical assumptions of francophone migrants and monolithic conceptions of the postcolonial nation-state. Yosefa Loshitzky writes of European migration films and the construct of Fortress Europe: ‘films dealing with migration and diaspora challenge European identity, particularly traditional notions of Europeanness, and how they subvert or/and reinforce hegemonic and counter-hegemonic attempts to construct and deconstruct European identity’ (2014: 195). Films like Exils, Le Grand Voyage and Le Havre are certainly not blind to the lingering power imbalances that mark French society, nor to the continued linguistic and cultural fracture which haunts the relationship between France and its former colonies. However, they provide new frames for understanding how multilingualism can operate within and beyond contemporary French society.

The shifting role of French

So, what roles can the French language play in multilingual films? Most obviously, French can be spoken as a native language, and thus be representative of nation and nationality. It can also operate as what I call an ‘unanchored language’: a lingua franca used beyond French soil, and among non-native speakers of French, in scenarios largely removed from discussions of French cultural identity and nation(ality) (see King, 2015). The unanchored language is one which is detached from its country of origin, and is thus distanced from the purview of traditional language politics. As Yildiz contends, such a distancing ‘carr[ies] the utopian promise of a “language without soil”’ (2011: 204). We see French functioning as an unanchored language in films like Rachid Bouchareb’s London River (2009), in which a woman from Guernsey and a Malian man meet in the UK, yet speak French because it is the only language they both know. French acts as a mutually familiar, yet mutually non-native language, as these two strangers join forces to search for their respective daughter and son, who are both missing in the wake of the July 2005 London bombings. The unanchored language is polycentric: it can serve a range of purposes in a multitude of spheres and is untied from fixed hierarchies. In London River, French offers a balanced, even diplomatic, linguistic terrain. Alison Smith calls this ‘a space “on the doorstep” in which a tentative cultural meeting can be initiated on equal terms and without commitment to the dangerous crossing into that place where the other is at home’ (2012: 75).

French can also be acquired in the process of cultural integration, as migrants and their families learn the language in order to carve out a place in metropolitan French society. The acquisition of the French language by migrants is often a process of cultural assimilation: a rite of passage that new arrivals to France must undergo in order to belong. This is the case, for example, in Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet (2007). Kechiche’s film follows Slimane, a Tunisian-born man who migrated with his now ex-wife Souad to France in the 1960s. Having worked in the shipyard of the Mediterranean town of Sète for 50 years, Slimane is abruptly laid off at the beginning of the film. Recruiting his extended family as staff, Slimane purchases a rusty boat and sets about turning it into a Tunisian restaurant, serving Souad’s traditional couscous. In its foregrounding of North African culture, Arabic language and mixed linguistic and familial communities, La Graine et le mulet renders a Mediterranean French city the site of a cross-cultural, Franco-Tunisian experiment which challenges the ideal of French cultural norms.

Films like La Graine et le mulet depict a range of typical migrant experiences in France, and the tensions between the official discourse of integration and the reality of multiculturalism. However, the aim of this article is to break ground on a new use of language that appears in a number of recent French films, but that has escaped critical or scholarly attention until now. It describes the experiences of the often unseen, misunderstood and ill-defined groups of people whose migration does not involve unilateral movement from the global south to France and remaining there. It describes the experience of learning and speaking a Western European language for moving figures whose international journey is not yet complete at the time when the film is set. To describe this fractured phenomenon, I propose the term langue de passage, in French rather than English for reasons explained below, by paraphrasing the dialogue from a key moment in La Graine et le mulet. After losing his job, Slimane explains his situation in weary French to his son-in-law José, who also works on the docks. José attempts to comfort his father-in-law with a curious phrase.

When José attempts to comfort his father-in-law, he does not blame Slimane’s French-born employer or white French racism towards African-born people. On the contrary, he underlines the fact that Slimane is now a French person himself. For José, Slimane’s job loss is not due to his Tunisian birth, nor his advancing age, but his French nationality. José explains; ‘ils veulent plus de Français’ (‘they don’t want French people anymore’). Slimane returns the sad joke (‘ils veulent plus de vieux, oui’ – ‘you mean they don’t want old people anymore’). But José insists, ‘Non, ils veulent plus de Français- ils préfèrent des types de passage.’

Who are these types de passage? The official English subtitles translate the term as ‘migrants’, which is not necessarily inaccurate, but which jettisons the nuance of the term in French. José is referring in particular to short-term economic migrants: transitory workers who can be blamed for taking French jobs but who do not intend to remain permanently on French soil in the long term. Type is a colloquial word for an individual (a ‘guy’) or a kind of person (a ‘sort’). ² Passage translates as both ‘passing’ (invoking impermanence) and ‘passage’ (invoking movement). A type de passage, therefore, is someone just passing through: someone lacking roots, someone whose place on French soil is temporary, shifting and often legally ambiguous. And just as such figures can be called types de passage, so too can the French language be seen as a langue de passage for such people. La Graine et le mulet fails to explore the linguistic experiences of such types, only referring to them in passing. But the film gives us the vocabulary to unpack the language dynamics of a number of contemporary films which focus in on these figures.

Dheepan and Welcome

Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan (2015) is a Tamil, French and English-language story of conflict and displacement. During the Sri Lankan civil war, three complete strangers, a Tamil man, woman and girl, agree to masquerade as a family who have been killed in the conflict, and whose passports the man has purchased on the black market. Pretending to be a family unit they are not, but escaping very real persecution, the three are granted asylum in France, where they are placed in a dilapidated HLM in outer Paris. Entirely ignorant of the French language, the woman, Yalini, and the man, Dheepan, must quickly learn basic French to carry out their duties as a caretaker and cleaner in their HLM, while their so-called daughter, Illayaal, must learn French to go to school. Yet as the three rapidly acquire competency in this new language, their surroundings become increasingly dangerous. Rival drug syndicates control their building, and as tensions rise between the gangs, the cité descends into a war zone eerily like the one the family fled in Sri Lanka. No sooner have they learned French than they must take flight once more, this time for England where Yalini has cousins, and their French language learning is abruptly abandoned.

Philippe Lioret’s film Welcome (2009) explores another case of movement and instability. The industrial French city of Calais is not only home to a thriving port industry, but is the entry point into the Channel Tunnel. As a result, it is a hotspot for undocumented migrants attempting to cross the Channel to the UK, by stowing away in a boat or the hold of a truck. The improvised camp that sprang up around the city was hauntingly known as the Jungle. (This shanty town was demolished amid heated debate and international news attention approximately seven years after the film’s release (Le Monde, 2016).) Welcome is situated in this tense environment, and follows a middle-aged French swimming teacher, Simon, who takes a young Kurd, 17-year-old Bilal, under his wing and provides him with accommodation and support. Bilal has walked thousands of kilometres from his native Kurdistan in the hopes of rejoining his girlfriend, whose family has migrated to London. Bilal has tried and failed to stow away in a truck, and has turned to the reluctant Simon to teach him how to swim the English Channel. As Bilal trains for the perilous journey, he must learn to understand some French in order to get by, and use linguistic tags such as ‘merci’, but as he and Simon grow close, they communicate mostly in English. Through this relationship, Welcome offers, as Alison Smith writes, ‘a challenge to conventional assumptions about linguistic assimilation and, through language, an alternative to the fraught assumptions of migrant relationships as those between host and guest’ (2012: 76). By the end of the film, Bilal has learned to swim and – like Dheepan, Yalini and Illayaal – has left French soil for good.

In La Graine et le mulet, the types de passage, the silent figures maligned by the film’s Franco-Tunisian characters, are economic migrants. In Dheepan, the Tamil protagonists are asylum seekers and eventually refugees. In Welcome, the types de passage are part of a nebulous group of people who pass under the radar in times of crisis, finding cracks in the walls of Fortress Europe in order to survive. But despite their differing legal status and motives for migrating, language plays a common role. For these characters, France is neither mother country nor adoptive one. Their presence on French soil, be it for economic or humanitarian reasons, is temporary. They have no family there, nor any historical connection to the country. For these travelling, shifting people, French is a langue de passage. Indeed, this term operates more effectively in French rather than in English, not simply because it plays with the phrase type de passage, but because it captures both the temporal and spatial dimensions of the meaning of the word passage in French. A langue de passage is a language of passing use, of temporary value, of fleeting usage in time. But a langue de passage is also a language of passage: a language used in movement, in flux, during a journey whose end lies beyond French borders and beyond the realm of the French language.

The langue de passage

There are many scenarios in which a language may have only a temporary or intermittent value for non-native speakers: obvious examples include tourism, studying abroad and other privileged forms of travel. The Catalan, Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish-speaking characters of Cédric Klapisch’s multilingual travel trilogy – L’Auberge espagnole (2002), Les Poupées russes (2005), and Casse-tête chinois (2013) – are prime examples of figures who engage with multiple languages, including lingua francas, but in relatively affluent and safe realms. By contrast, the langue de passage denotes a linguistic situation with higher stakes. In Dheepan and Welcome, the langue de passage is a way to forge critical personal relationships that can spell the difference between safety and homelessness, comfort and hunger, and even life and death. The langue de passage is a linguistic tool that is only relevant, important and useful for a finite period of time in these characters’ lives. But despite its transience, it still has a central and a critical role to play.

In Welcome, Bilal arrives in France with no knowledge of the French language. Despite spending several months in the Jungle of Calais, he is rarely required to communicate in French, as many of his fellow migrants speak either Kurdish or English. Simon is also a fluent English speaker, and the vast majority of the dialogue between the two protagonists takes place in this lingua franca. Even the nightly soup kitchen where Simon’s ex-wife Marion volunteers operates in English. But Bilal’s efforts to comprehend, if not speak, basic French not only allow him to understand the high stakes of his surroundings (such as when Simon’s racist neighbour threatens to tell the police about his illegal harbouring of an undocumented migrant), but to navigate practical scenarios, such as grocery shopping.

In Dheepan, nine-year-old Illayaal is the first in the family to acquire proficiency in French, her age having automatically granted her a legitimate place in a French-speaking environment: the public school system. This knowledge lends her a position of authority as a linguistic bridge between French-speaking HLM inhabitants and her parents, and places her in an interpreting role common to many children of first-generation migrants. Dheepan slowly follows her, as his role as caretaker puts him in daily contact with French speakers and requires him to communicate with his neighbours. Yalini, despite being an otherwise confident and independent character, already bilingual in Tamil and English, is afforded far fewer opportunities to learn French and is more isolated from the community. Yet she eventually acquires sufficient French not only to work as a maid, but to protect Dheepan, Illayaal and herself, even from potentially fatal threats. Towards the end of the film, Dheepan paints a white line across the cité’s yard, separating his residential building from the tower housing the drug operations. The operation’s leader, Brahim, is also Yalini’s employer. Following a tense meeting when Brahim tells Yalini that he will not hesitate to kill Dheepan for his interference, Yalini’s French language learning culminates in an earnest appeal to Brahim. Hearing him enter the apartment, she paces around the kitchen, miming the words she has practised as she waits for him to enter. Then she implores:

This appeal is made in broken French and supplemented with English words and mime. Yet in this particular context, fluent French is not required: only the successful transmission of the message is essential. Nor will it be long, of course, before Yalini does not need to use the French language at all. The interplay of linguistic knowledge and ignorance continues to dog the characters throughout Dheepan, moulding their relationships with others and their ability to survive in the French banlieue. Yet this survival is not only dependent on understanding and speaking French. In fact, in the early days of his caretaking duties, Dheepan’s ignorance of French actually protects him when he has to enter the domain of the drug smugglers to do the cleaning. As he learns French, he strategically conceals this fact from the smugglers, so that he cannot be implicated in their activities. In fact, ignorance of French is, counter-intuitively, the key to saving Yalini’s life in the most crucial scene of the film. During a siege, as gang members rebel against Brahim, Dheepan must walk right past several of the men to enter the building where Brahim is holding Yalini hostage. The gang members shout at him in French to back down, but Dheepan pretends not to understand. Exasperated, they let him pass, his feigned ignorance acting as a protective barrier and a means of gaining access that would otherwise be denied.

Thus French knowledge is valuable, but feigned ignorance of French becomes useful as well. Equally important is the role of other languages, of West and South Asian origin, which would not normally be considered to have cultural currency in urban French society. In Welcome, Bilal not only speaks Kurdish with his friends, but with prospective people smugglers. In the corners of the Jungle where Bilal finds himself, Kurdish has greater currency than French. In Dheepan, Tamil is the primary language used by the protagonists, and is even spoken beyond the home as a secret code they use to stay alive in their dangerous surroundings. French is neither mother tongue nor primary language of use, but a practical necessity to be learned not only to stay alive, but to gather the resources to leave France entirely.

Most studies of multilingualism in French cinema focus on the representation of long-term migrants in France, who must juggle their mother tongue(s) alongside French (see important studies by Tarr (2005) and Higbee (2013)). Yet the langue de passage denotes a rougher, more improvised, and less clearly defined relationship with language – one which does not necessarily operate along neo-colonial lines of cultural assimilation. In Dheepan, learning French allows Yalini and Dheepan to gain employment, and Illayaal to enter the French education system. In Welcome, a basic understanding of French allows Bilal and his Kurdish friends to navigate Calais, though it is English which becomes of most value to both Bilal and his French host. Of course, there are key differences between the two films: Dheepan’s characters have papers granting them legal refuge in France, while Welcome’s Bilal is undocumented and must hide from French police to avoid deportation. But the results for both sets of protagonists are the same: each will ultimately leave French territory in search of resettlement in Great Britain. All come from areas of the Asian continent where French is not spoken. All learn just enough French to get by, but no more. And all will leave France – and French – behind by the end of the films.

In their focus on protagonists whose ultimate destination lies beyond French-speaking territory, Dheepan and Welcome offer alternative views of the twenty-first century migrant experience, casting their gaze beyond the borders of the Hexagon and thus unseating France and French from a monopolistic position of importance. French is a key language in all these films, but it is far from the only one. Their mother tongues remain essential, and that other Western lingua franca, English, is of critical value in both films, and will be the language the characters use in their future lives in the UK (though tragically, Bilal will never actually reach British shores). The result is a decentred picture of language relations in today’s French cinema that bends the conventions of Eurocentrism.

Conclusion

Contemporary French films do not ignore the imbalances of power that arise from the lingering effects of colonialism, the neoliberal hierarchy, and the economic imbalances between the Third and First Worlds. Dheepan’s and Welcome’s non-French characters suffer more deeply and more often than their French-born ones. It is also significant that the characters in both films seek to settle in the UK, which for Dheepan’s Sri Lankan characters is a former coloniser. But these films also reject rigid hierarchical conceptions of language and power, exploring the potential of diverse languages to offer cultural capital and resources to their speakers. In these films, the French language is beginning to share its once-unrivalled position of value.

In these transnational stories, the circulation of people, cultural values and languages is not binary, but polyvalent. Languages are learned and lost, used and tossed aside. The result is a deeply complex and multilateral linguistic landscape, in which multilingualism can be both ideologically and practically empowering. For these characters, French, alongside English, is a langue de passage. Once they have embarked on the final leg of their journeys, the French language quickly fades away. This picture of language relations reflects the porous nature of the contemporary French cultural landscape and the many spheres of influence which comprise it.