Netflix was supposed to be the great democratizer. The streaming platform’s most ardent fans have argued in its favor as a level playing field, instantaneously providing a global audience of millions to smaller independent films that would otherwise never reach them. Critics of the service’s business model have posited that dropping little-known films into such a vast library with little-to-no marketing or promotion would damn those titles to an obscurity even more severe. Just one of the cases in point for the latter school of thought: The World Is Yours by Romain Gavras, a sly crime comedy that Netflix acquired for the US after a positive premiere at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, then allowed to languish for six months before unceremoniously dumping it into the unending sea of content (it’s available on Amazon Prime in the UK). The release hardly made a blip that December, and in the year-and-change since, its reputation hasn’t grown much.
It’s a grave injustice that should be easily remedied, seeing as Gavras follows in a popular tradition of roundly, generously enjoyable gangster mischief. There’s a little Scorsese and a little Ritchie in his fleet-footed stylizing, which whisks audiences through a caper and its attendant double-crosses with a roving, restless camera. Gavras comes from the world of music videos (he directed the nine-minute clip for M.I.A.’s Born Free, in which riot troopers carry out a genocide against redheads), and applies many of the same techniques to long-form narrative. But where many talents making that creative migration in the past have hidden behind slow-mo, format changes and other slickness – “like a music video” still gets the occasional workout as a stock critical diss – Gavras folds it all into a story with the substance to justify its sumptuous flash.
Kind and merciful, Farès (Karim Leklou, his round face perfectly non-threatening) doesn’t belong in the criminal demimonde, and he knows it. He’s finally set up the job that he hopes will provide him with enough seed money to go legit as the chief provider of ice pops to the Maghreb region of north Africa, and to reject the life of ruthlessness foisted on him by his ice-cold mother (Isabelle Adjani). She’s just one of the unstable quantities trifling with Farès’s plan, an ensemble including an Illuminati conspiracy-monger, a rage-prone Scotsman, his eight-year-old daughter and a pair of trigger-happy idiots with Tony Montana fantasies that lend the film its title. You know at least part of the drill; no one can be trusted, things go wrong and yet there’s something unexpected and satisfying about who gets to clinch their happy ending, and how.
A spiky political subtext also sneaks up on a viewer while they’re busy chuckling at the gallows humor. (The aforementioned morons get the bleakest laugh when one imagines killing their boss and retiring in luxury together, then the other immediately envisions the same scenario frame by frame, except he also shoots his partner and keeps the loot for himself.) Much of Farès’s scheme hinges on the xenophobia against Muslims and African immigrants currently festering in France and Spain. The climactic heist plays something like a well-told joke, its punchline being that the gang-averse Spanish police can be readily manipulated into action with even the faintest whiff of terrorist activity.
In another world, this would be something of an event on the international cinema circuit, between its high-wattage cast (Adjani and co-star Vincent Cassel rank as two of the bigger names in France’s industry) and Gavras’s instinct for crowd-pleasing. He does everything bombastically; he likes musical interludes, whether that’s a karaoke rendition of Toto’s Africa or clutch soundtracking from the of-the-moment electronic virtuoso Jamie xx. His major set pieces – a boatjacking that ends in flame, a bomb scare at a water park – have a zest and ambition absent from many film-makers of his relative greenness. It’s just the sort of hidden treasure an adventurous watcher would’ve once picked up at a video store, or wandered into at an arthouse theater. It’s much harder to stumble upon in the endless scroll of the streaming format; until a better system devises itself, we’ll have to pick up the slack of spreading the word.
The World Is Yours is available on Netflix in the US and Amazon Prime in the UK
