Although Karim Dridi's second feature has all the elements of a slick gangsta flick -- crime, racism, disaffected black youths -- it shuns the cliches of overblown Hollywood violence for a more intimate but no less dramatic look at the relationship between two young brothers caught up in the cultural maelstrom of contemporary France. Two young "beurier" (the children of Arab immigrants to France) brothers arrive in the Mediterranean port of Marseille after a family crisis prompts them to leave Paris. Ismael (Sami Bouajilla) and his younger brother Mouloud (Ouassini Embarek) take up with their uncle and his lively family. Ismael finds work in a shipyard, makes friends with a white man. From the beginning, the two must fend against racist taunts and insinuations, but things get even more complicated when Ismael falls for his black girlfriend.
Mouloud, meanwhile, has been ordered back to Tunisia, but instead runs away and gets entangled with a local drug dealer. In a slightly overwrought scene, Ismael bursts in on the drug dealer and rescues his younger brother. The two drive off into the sunset. Bye Bye's strength is in its characters: like the banjee boy grandson who hides his stash under his silent, tattooed grandmother, or the Negrophile's foaming white supremacist brother, or the based-out drug dealer and his pre-pubescent girlfriend. Dridi has created a narrative loose enough to accomodate his wily characters' rapid breathing. As in his feature debut, Pigalle, Dridi shows his skill as a director lies in understanding a place that is not just about beautiful landscapes or heroic individuals, but about architecture peopled with life. Instead of gutless prosletyzing, Dridi gives us a screen that shimmers with characters that are as nuanced, provocative and distinctly urban as the mean streets they survive.
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