To what extent are the characters in the Urban Stories you have viewed victims of a more dominant social and political ideology?

     The theme of a stinging socio-political driving force runs throughout films which centralise around Urban Stories, particularly within Kassovitz's 'La Haine' and León de Aranoa's 'Princesas.' This force, however, is represented in different lights through each constructed technical code to portray how politics are shaped differently in opposing cultures.

     Within León de Aranoa's work based in Spain, this force is perhaps more invisible as the act of prostitution is more integrated and soaked into every day society. Represented through the real footage of prostitutes in a vast and gritty open space reflected in the mise-en-scene, it is suggested that what the audience is watching is not a construction but a verisimilitude reflection of reality, the handheld camera illustrating that these characters are human and three-dimensional. Thus, the one girl who tight-rope walks topless with widened arms to almost mirror an omniscient or God-like figure poses the question of whether prostitutes within Spain truly have power, or are "victims" of something darker. For instance, the way in which protagonist Caye opens the film stating the rules over her body perhaps gives her a feminist control over her body and choices in life. However, as the film's disequilibrium forms, we see that the main force which oppresses the prostitutes is that of masculine power and a corrupt system. This patriarchal society can be channeled through when the protagonist is forced to perform oral sex on her male client, the framing illustrating her on her knees, a metaphor for how she is pushed down by male status, the camera placed on the gritty floor to show how we are being sucked into her street level which is beneath these impure layers of corporatism.

     In comparison to 'La Haine,' females are underrepresented as the film is pumped with testosterone and lacks the tender themes of the Spanish piece, yet also mirrors France's male dominated and patriarchal ideologies, demonstrated through its growing Imperialistic force. The reality of this political force is symbolised within the opening of the film which also portrays real footage of the banlieues rioting against police authority figures with the contrasting non-diegetic sound of Bob Marley's 'Burnin' and A-Lootin' Tonight', the film's entirety washed in black and white to represent how the French policy towards ethnic minorities is one of assimilation and contains grey areas of confliction. As the 'new town' in which 'La Haine' was filmed in consisted of over sixty different ethnicities and nationalities, the narrative theme of a racial plethora underlines this confliction with higher forces, supported by the lack of traditional French music used, ranging from Jamaican to an Edith Piaf remix with the hip-hop 'Sound of da Police,' because Kassovitz is commenting on the cultural mix of Paris and its Westernised social ideologies.

      Whilst Kassovitz is giving these races identities through the introduction of protagonists Jewish Vinz, Arab Said, and Afro-French Hubert whereby their names are fed with exposition in extreme close-ups, he also displays how these characters are being influenced by this social ideology of Westernisation and racial mixing within the mise-en-scene. For instance, in Vinz's bedroom, his wall is plastered with posters of iconic pop culture imagery such as Marilyn Monroe and wrestlers, whilst Hubert's shows Muhammad Ali and a black power salute at the Olympics. The referencing to American culture is a recurring theme throughout the film, for instance when Vinz reenacts the renowned 'Are you talking to me?' sequence from Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver,' and when the trio discuss cartoon characters like Coyote and The Roadrunner in a long, almost fatalistic alleyway in the centre of Paris. Not only does this theme represent these people living in banlieues as young and vulnerable, but also shows that these social ideologies that often contain violence are being injected into urban culture to trigger their stimulation and idolisation, strengthened by the Hypodermic needle theory that creates these people as victims of something gargantuan.

     This theory can further be applied to 'Princesas,' where the gargantuan force is the media, and how it injects superficial social ideologies of body image into female audiences. For example, Caye saves up for breast implants within the narrative, her insecurities portrayed in the mise-en-scene when she uses a cut out of her own head and places it onto hyper-real naked and female magazine models. The film, therefore, focuses on the more commercial face of urban life in comparison to Kassovitz's piece, symbolised by the film's recurring motif of Caye's mobile phone, which rings when her clients are calling. The phone itself is pink and almost barbie-esque, the girly mise-en-scene contrasting against the dark perversion behind the caller, making Caye an almost depersonalised analogy of this object. Thus, in a close-up of the phone vibrating almost off the desk, we see that living a life of prostitution equates to living on the edge where a downfall is inevitable, suggesting that these socio-political commercial ideologies are shallow and plaster over deep human suffering with a plastic pink casing.