ONLY ONE PERSON dances in the short film by Valentin Noujaïm Pacific Club, 2023, named after Pacific Club Privé, a quondam nightclub once located in a multi-storey car park under an office building in La Défense, the steel fortress built just outside of Paris. Open every evening to a predominantly Arab, North African and immigrant clientele for most of the 1980s, bops shot from the Pacific by Quebec R&B actor Boule Noire, American soul singer Lillo Thomas and French-Italian singer of Egyptian descent and gay icon Dalida, among others; the club also introduced raï music and hip-hop to two generations of local black and Arab people who were old enough to go there, or at least hear about it from their older siblings or cousins. Noujaïm’s film wanders through the concrete landscape where the Pacific Club once stood; its dancer, the Parisian choreographer Benjamin Taos Bertrand, begins a number on the ground of a vacant parking lot, prostrate. A sudden jolt causes his limbs to stiffen; a second propels it a foot or two forward. As it rises, it slides and pivots downward. aortic swells and the rhythmless textures of a track by electronic music duo Space Afrika, and skids through the gray, depopulated complex with moves that cite ballet and breakdance, occasionally returning in a viewer’s walk – a dance which falls and plunges, hides, and after a few moments disappears.
For several years now, Noujaïm, born in the city of Angers in northwestern France to Egyptian and Lebanese parents and currently based in Frankfurt, has written and directed a series of films that combine documentary storytelling with elements of myth and science fiction to frame the stories. about the disappearance of places and peoples, and about the cosmos of the possible that exists just behind the elaborate architecture that the French state erects so that history can better forget them. In 2021 Destined Girls (Daughters of Destiny), the disappointment felt by a trio of queer girls at the closing of their favorite bar is interrupted by an opportunity for interstellar travel; in the “self-movie” of 2020 The Blue Star (The blue star), Noujaim’s family story is told using a palimpsest of photographs his grandfather took while in the Lebanese army, DV footage captured when Noujaim returned in Lebanon and coils taken from the NASA archives. The mostly silent footage is accompanied by several overlapping voiceovers in Arabic and French, including one by French actor Denis Lavant, whose distinctive rasp tells the story of a dark-haired man who, after having received transmissions from a distant planet called Blue Star, abandons his family. for a fantasy of chimerical assimilation. Pacific Club is the first work of the director’s “Le Défense” trilogy (the second, a fiction film entitled Exist under permanent suspicionfeaturing Saint Omer‘s Kayije Kagame, will be released this fall). Peaceful unearths the catacomb vivacity of the eponymous and beloved club to offer an oblique view of Mitterrand-era France, hinting at how the former president’s racist administration exploited AIDS, property development and heroin to oppress Arab life in the aftermath of French colonial rule.
The film opens with newsreel footage illustrating the pharaonic architectural program Mitterrand oversaw during his fourteen years in office, darting Paris from the Louvre to La Défense with postmodern carbuncles praising the doomed return to power of the French Socialist Party. . We see a partially built Grande Arche de la Défense, the cuboidal structure symbolizing “Brotherhood” and erected for the bicentenary of the French Revolution, towering above a neighborhood built on razed slums, slums, abandoned factories and farmland, once home to tens of thousands of Algerian migrants and citizens. Noujaïm’s film makes little reference to the neighborhood’s decades-long prehistory, the leveling of which ultimately brought the Pacific Club to life. Instead, he weaves together interviews with playful choreography, animations and found footage to create an elusive image of the bygone box at the center of the work, an elegy stripped of mythomania. At no time does Noujaïm peddle clichéd claims about the revolutionary potential of nightlife, or offer a genealogy of the Pacific Club as the ancestor of places like The Galaxy, La Maine Jaune, The Midnight and The Fun Raï, which opened their doors to the Arab population of Paris throughout the Mitterrand years.
Retrieval and withdrawal – such is the wandering flow that drives Noujaïm’s aesthetic, as he gazes at the glassy steel landscapes of La Défense as a cold beyond or an antimonument. Pacific ClubThe stroll is anchored in the testimony of Azedine Benabdelmounene, a Franco-Algerian born in the 19th arrondissement of Paris who, years before agreeing to be filmed, helped Noujaïm move to Paris. Sleek and in his fifties, we see Benabdelmounene alternating shots that show him from afar, insensitive to Defense Plaza, and in a medium shot, where he speaks frankly to the camera. His memories of visiting the Pacific are conveyed through anecdotes about the older siblings who took him there (“Since I didn’t have a lot of money on me, I was just borrowing stuff from my older brother “); why they went there (“we wouldn’t be allowed anywhere else”); and what they wore: (“Adidas Tobacco shoes, turtlenecks…everyone called him the REURTI [a slangy inversion of word tireur, the French word for shooter] orient himself.”). Later, his account takes us to scenes outside the Pacific Club, where fights broke out between young men, heroin was bought and sold, and THE cops closed his eyes: “As long as it’s between Arabs and Blacks, we don’t care.”
A funeral song performed by the Parisian alto saxophonist Julian Mezence closes the film. The dancer slipped away and Benabdelmounene, after speaking of the loss of a teenage friend to the heroin epidemic, fell silent. A simple animation of the narrow dance hall is introduced. It floats in space, and inside the room, several line silhouettes undulate in small groups, their whispers muffled, their intimate gestures drained of dimension. Slowly the black box spins blurry, like a dice thrown into the dust of starry space, which, like the story, is blurry and incomplete.
