Édouard Luntz – Les coeurs verts (1966)

adminJanuary 17, 2020

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Outside at night. Tower of lodgings. A syncopated jazz accompanies the successive appearances of young people in front of the camera. Zim, delivered to the police by locals for stealing gasoline, ends up in jail. On the day of his release, he meets Jean-Pierre, who has just been released from the same Parisian jail. The two youngsters become friends. Back in the suburb, Zim decides to find a job and tries to convince Jean-Pierre to go with him… without success. Far from New Wave movies which are becoming more and more bourgeois,
“Les Cœurs verts” is the first fiction film centred on the youth of the housing estates, played by a real gang of greasers, these “bad boys” from the working class, who were then in the news. Both naturalistic and poetic, Luntz’s free camera is empathetic but also uncompromising. For although he is aware of the generational conflict in a society that leaves no room for these idle young people in search of freedom, Luntz does not hesitate to show the immature feelings of rebellious adolescence, however hard they may be….
First feature film which forces respect, matrix of films made 30 years later on the disarray of the French suburbs such “La Haine” which is directly inspired by it. Cinéma Nova