THE STORY – A few years after the Charlie Hebdo attack, teacher Samuel Paty leads a classroom discussion on free speech in a suburban Paris school. A lie, carried by outrage and amplified online, sets off a chain reaction no one can control. As tensions escalate and silence spreads, an ordinary lesson turns into a fatal spiral. In the aftermath, voices collide to confront a devastating truth: how a rumor, a clique, and collective inaction can lead to the irreparable.
THE CAST – Antoine Reinartz, Emmanuelle Bercot, Nedjim Bouizzoul, Emma Boumali, Nhoa François, Marwan Zeghoudi & Etienne Guillou-Kervern
THE TEAM – Vincent Garenq (Director/Writer) & Alexis Abdelkrim Kebbas (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 100 Minutes
On October 16th, 2020, the teacher Samuel Paty was murdered near the school where he taught in a suburb of Paris. Specifically, he was publicly beheaded by Abdoullakh Anzorov, an 18-year-old Islamic extremist. This act represented the violent conclusion of a frenzied situation stemming from a lesson he taught about the controversial Charlie Hebdo caricatures depicting the prophet Muhammad. It’s a defining modern case of pushback against the freedom of speech, ironically stemming from a discussion about the importance of that very topic. With “Forsaken,” director Vincent Garenq has dramatized the final 11 days of Paty’s life, deploying a large ensemble to tell the story of what happened and how, using as many perspectives as possible from Paty’s friends, colleagues, and those who viewed him as an enemy. Its attempt to cover this story from practically every angle is admirable, and it’s an undeniably powerful piece of docudrama. However, its all-encompassing approach leads to some dramatic shortcuts, notably in the simplistic dialogue and broad characterizations.
The film smartly tells its story in linear order, building its multiple points of contention and areas of strife in a way that naturally increases the tension. This thriller-like quality is emphasized by Nicolas Errèra’s unsettling music and the cinematography’s paranoid framing. Focus and lighting are used to make certain characters appear extra frightening, most notably Paty’s eventual assassin. He’s obscured from the audience’s view, lingering on the edges and backgrounds of shots, almost like a giallo killer (his all-black wardrobe further underlines this comparison).
With directorial choices like this, Garenq is clearly not trying to be objective in his storytelling. Smartly, he includes a wide range of opinions and viewpoints from all corners of Paty’s life. The main source of the complaints against Paty is two Muslim men, one of whom is the father (Nedjim Bouizzoul) of a troubled student named Bashira (Emma Boumali) who lies about her proximity and reaction to Paty’s Charlie Hebdo lesson, and another who is a reactionary extremist (Azize Kabouche). But despite the presence of these two, they’re notably outnumbered in the story by other parents of Paty’s students who are also Muslim, but who understand and aren’t bothered by the circumstances of the troublesome lesson in question. On the other hand, some additional criticisms of Paty come from other teachers in the school who don’t agree with his methods and wish to remain distant from the firestorm. These are wise tactics by Garenq and his co-writer, Alexis Kebbas, that make the film feel like it’s coming from a place of truth rather than hearsay or generalization.
However, this storytelling angle, with a large cast, means the film’s focus is, by nature, scattered. Specifically, Paty himself feels less like a three-dimensional character and more like an idea of the real-life teacher. As played by Antoine Reinartz, Paty is entirely gentle and unchangingly amiable, even when he’s pressed up against the metaphorical wall. On the other hand, those who seek to silence him are portrayed as cartoonishly monstrous, with Kabouche’s character Tahar Amara coming across like a caricature of an angry zealot. This black-and-white approach to the characters’ personalities robs the story of the depth that it deserves. Not helping matters is the dialogue, which, possibly because so many speaking characters are featured, sounds like a shorthand version of how humans actually talk. Characters have a habit of announcing their unvarnished thoughts and opinions immediately after entering a room or starting a conversation. It’s a screenwriting habit that makes the film feel surface-level in its exploration.
“Forsaken” (or, for this discussion point, its untranslated title “L’Abandon”) is, obviously, incredibly French in the specifics of its central story. The film partially blames the lack of swift resolution on the various systems of contradicting and inhibiting bureaucracy that French citizens must navigate. One memorable scene features the school principal (Emmanuelle Bercot, giving a fantastic, appropriately concentrated performance) trying to reach external help and facing a barrage of governmental and departmental acronyms that she frantically scribbles on an absurd number of Post-It notes. This assessment of the areas where Paty’s safety was betrayed by those who are ostensibly there to help him is summed up by the too-neat conclusion, as spelled out with an aggressively literal monologue by the case’s investigator.
But other aspects of the film will speak to anyone who’s had to deal with emotionally abusive parents anywhere in the world, or to those of us unlucky enough to be trapped on social media. In the US, it’s become commonplace for parents to take their children at their word, over the testimony of adult authority figures, just as Bashira’s father does. And he and Amara whip up support for their misinformed cause thanks to the reactionary ways of the modern Internet. We’ve all experienced a frustrating situation where singular perspectives get amplified into universal truths on social media, and “Forsaken” makes it clear that the Internet’s ability to exacerbate tricky situations contributed to the escalation of what began as just one school’s issue.
“Forsaken” works best as a cinematic rendering of a horrifying event stemming from uniquely 21st-century troubles. And while it struggles to balance all aspects of its story, the level of rage and emotions that it both captures and evokes in viewers is inarguably a mark of its clear, if partial, success.
