As early as the 1970s, many works of fiction surveyed the French banlieues and filmed them as if they were a world unto their own: territories standing away from the big cities, where the same scenarios of social exclusion and pain are endlessly repeated. The neighbourhoods, the council housing form the basis of these narratives, and space is structured around them in a purely contextual way. The camera stays close to the characters, hangs around the group, focuses on their individual destinies. These ‘banlieusards’ are, most often, teenagers trying to tame their rebellious energy, to realise their desire to achieve success or to get out and away from there. In almost every film, they end up confronting law enforcement. And the architectural space, meanwhile, the buildings, the staircases, the high-rises, appear mainly as stigmatised containers.

In movies such as Tea in the Harem (Mehdi Charef, 1985), La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), Inner City (Jean-François Richet, 1995), Douce France (Malik Chibane, 1995), Ma 6-T va crack-er (Jean-François Richet, 1997) or Bye-Bye (Karim Dridi, 1995), the banlieue is represented as a dreadful lanscape, or as a territory that is to be occupied, or as an unusual setting for a love story and all related conflicts. In short, in most films about the banlieue, the fictional narrative uses sociology and geography to depict in an exceedingly emotional manner the fate of the ‘banlieusard’, a lost cause who may be redeemable or even rehabilitated. As Thierry Paquot said: ‘to shoot a film in the banlieue does not mean filming the banlieue’.

Eric Rohmer’s Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987) is one notable exception: the Parisian banlieue is new, architecturally interesting, and it is home to young men and women whose only worry in life is experiencing it fully and experimenting with blossoming desires. In this modern and luminous setting, Rohmer’s young bodies exchange various ‘kinds of courtesies’ and discuss in affected whispers the delightful contradictions of their feelings. In an interview in the newspaper Libération, Rohmer said: