"Les Arènes": a look behind the scenes of the football business

In "Les Experts Cinéma" this week, Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci discuss "Les Arènes" by Camille Perton and "L'effacement" by Karim Moussaoui.

In Les Arènes, we delve behind the scenes into the world of football, particularly among players' agents. The star, or rather the prize, of this harsh, cruel, and also very masculine world is young Brahim, played by Iliès Kadri, a young and talented footballer still in training at Lyon.

Still a minor, but already showing a lot of promise at center forward, promises that arouse covetousness that his cousin and trained agent, Mehdi (Sofiane Khammes), tries to both fuel and calm. He wants his young protégé to stay focused on what he knows how to do and does well: playing soccer. But he's been slow to secure a transfer for him, and the mysterious Francis, an influential and unscrupulous agent, is lurking nearby.

As with Tristan Séguéla's film Mercato a few weeks ago, what interests Camille Perton isn't so much the sport itself—there are few images of football or fans to sink one's teeth into—as this world of middlemen and negotiators. They handle dizzying sums on boats on the Riviera, in luxury hotels and restaurants, where seduction and the gift of the gab are often decisive weapons.

While The Arena may suffer from a somewhat tame and bland quality that tends to neutralize its stakes or emotion, the film is rather well-crafted and well-acted, with plenty of suspense. Camille Perton dares to embrace a queer theme and aesthetic, in the person of the formidable agent Francis, aka Edgar Ramirez, who never really strays far from the grotesque, but nevertheless works well.

Eight years after the film Waiting for the Swallows – which already spoke of the suffocation of Algerian society, but with a hint of hope in its intimacy –, The Erasure clearly speaks of the crushing of a youth, which the regime put under the extinguisher after the Hirak , a spontaneous movement that shook the power in 2019. If the film denies carrying a political message, it is nevertheless political. Réda, a young son of a notable (his father is a senior executive in the oil and gas industry), never says what he thinks, nor what he aspires to: his patriarch does it for him. When his older brother, in revolt, flees the family and the country and his father, hunted by his enemies, suddenly dies, Réda is left to his own devices. Violence will be his only means of expression.

Karim Moussaoui uses fantasy to illustrate his character's drift. Formally, the film confirms the talent of this filmmaker, who was unable to film in Algeria. Not for political reasons, apparently, but one senses he's walking on eggshells in the current context of a hardening regime and extreme tensions between Paris and Algiers.