1963. The first man to have flown in space sets foot in Ivry-sur-Seine to inaugurate a city in his name. The Cité Gagarin must welcome the families of immigrants who had previously lived in shantytowns on the outskirts of Paris or who were on their way to a better horizon. 2019. The young Youri, 16, dreamer at heart and cosmonaut in the making, is one of the families who have given hundreds of faces in addition to a name to this city. And after 56 years, Gagarin is deemed unsanitary and doomed to demolition. A decision that Youri, viscerally attached to his city, cannot accept. The teenager will do anything to save his mother ship from perdition.
Originally, it was only a series of documentary portraits of the inhabitants of the Cité Gagarin, in the suburbs of Paris. Pieces of life told by people whose habitat is condemned to destruction. Then, these portraits became a short fiction film, co-written with those the film is about: the inhabitants of Gagarin. But the director duo Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, rightly, felt that the subject deserved more. Much more.
In orbit beyond appearances
Films dealing with life in French cities have been abounding in cinemas for many moons. However, no one had so far succeeded in giving life to the city itself, its rubble stones and its windows, to make it an entity in its own right. Liatard and Trouilh, from this first feature film, manage to breathe a soul into the red bricks of Gagarin and to make us discover a city from a completely new angle. Through the eyes of Youri, they inject poetry into this place abandoned by society and the inhabitants. The building is his DiscoveryOne, orbiting a distant sun. The references to 2001, a space odyssey are numerous and oh so dreamlike. And to push the central role of these walls even further, they even become editing supports by acting as natural shutters between the planes. In this original and refreshing way of filming the urban environment, everything is an excuse to send us into orbit beyond what we see.
Sound plays a large part in the success of the parallel between building and ship. The subtle sound effects of the city with interstellar sounds is accompanied by a finely crafted soundtrack by the Galperine brothers and Amine Bouhafa, who tunes the piano with the theremin and makes us feel all the immensity of space as much as the ties between the people of Gagarin.
From this drifting ship, a force emerges: the attachment between the characters. This city is first and foremost people with whom they have lived, grown up and who have made a place their “home”. So, as much as they may have hated it at times, they love the city. Up to the inexplicable, up to the absurd, like this neighbor who leaves taking his letterbox. The human being is an extraterrestrial like the others. It is nevertheless these slices of life that are at the origin of the film and which give it its credibility. The archival images inserted into the film only serve as a reminder of the documentary work done upstream with the inhabitants of Gagarin on the point of saying goodbye to their homes.
With such weapons, the realization makes us easily feel Youri’s visceral attachment to this city which has become his family in place of his absent mother. He has Gagarin in his skin, as the play of reflections on the camera likes to underline. This love for the place makes the character all the more endearing. Youri reveals the imagination of a child and arouses our wonder with the poetic naivety of his view of the city and life. Its interpreter, Alséni Bathily, for whom this is the very first film, bursts the screen with his quiet strength, imperturbable on the surface, but hiding an entire interior universe in expansion.
Stamped with the seal of the Cannes 2020 ghost edition and selected for the César 2022 for best first film, Gagarin will have taken a year to cross the Atlantic to reach us, and it was high time. That’s enough to have stars in your eyes.