A young man (Jason François), a member of a trailer-park-based Romany community in northern France, is planning to get baptised tomorrow and tries on his spotless white outfit, prompting his mother to warn him not to get it dirty. Naturally, by the end of the film it will be covered in filth, blood and dust, as the kid tags along with his cousin and older brothers for a spot of armed robbery. That mix of heavy-handed symbolism and grotty realism is the basic modus operandi of director Jean-Charles Hue’s feature, which casts non-professional actors and uses their real names for the characters, all the better to blur the lines between fiction and documentary. It works well enough, thanks to Hue’s facility in coaxing credible performances from the cast, but it’s a bit slow to warm up. Once the noir engine is running and the chaps get on the road, it really starts to hum, with snappy banter and more propulsive editing.
