Arthur Rambo (Laurent Cantet, 2021)

For CINEMA SCOPE's 2021 TIFF Coverage:

In a lot of ways, Arthur Rambo is precisely the film we deserve. Less a full-fledged narrative than an illustrated storytime post, it’s sort of an accidental companion piece to Janicza Bravo’s Zola, which showcased the ability of one young woman to tweet her way into fleeting artistic relevance. By contrast, Laurent Cantet’s latest chronicles and almost real-time destruction of a French-Algerian literary wunderkind (Rabah Nait Oufella) following the strangely-timed revelation that he used to be an Internet edgelord. As much about the fickleness of the gauchiste cultural set as anything else (young author Karim D. is hailed as the Voice of the Banlieue, but summarily ostracized when it’s discovered that his alter-ego was an Islamo-fascist shitposter), Arthur Rambo strikes all the expected hot buttons while strategically adopting no real perspective on the phenomenon it represents. Although Cantet is merciful enough to never have a character utter the words “cancel culture” onscreen, Rambo is a callow effort guarenteed to appeal to trolls lurking under every bridge: the Very Online, the free-speech blowhards who love them, and the know-nothing centrists of the New York Times editorial page.

The film, it turns out, is only as shallow as real life. The script is loosely based on the rise and fall of Mehdi Meklat, a young writer whose political blogging and debut novel Burnout made him a rising star on the French literary scene. Soon, his old tweets, posted under the pseudonym Marcelin Deschamps, came to light, crashing his career. After a suitable period in writer-jail, Meklat returned with Autopsy, a book dealing with his social media ordeal. It’s a familiar template: lose big, lick your wounds, and then make the comeback, reminding everyone that you were That Guy from three years and a thousand scandals ago. Arthur Rambo essentially follows that roadmap in miniature, although it stops short of depicting Karim D.’s slight return. During its slim 90 minutes, Karim hurtles through every justification on the bingo card: I was young; I was playing a character; it was a literary experiment; I was addicted to the likes and follows; and finally, I was the voice of immigrant rage, and you can’t handle the truth.

At times, it almost seems as if part of the raision d’être of Arthur Rambo is to provide an excuse for Cantet and his viewers to revel in the forbidden pleasures of Karim’s tweets. Appearing as onscreen text throughout the film, they are just what you’d expect, mostly homophobic and anti-Semitic 4chan invective designed to suggest that conservatives are the new punk rock or whatever. It’s idiocy that cleverly cloaks itself in a contemporary discourse that proposes that perhaps we should take idiocy seriously, that it is Saying Something. There’s an awkward, disconcerting feeling throughout Arthur Rambo that the entire enterprise exists so that prim, button-down audiences can snigger over bon mots like “Hey Jews, there’s still room on the trains! #auschwitz,” the way white people sing along with rap songs so they can roll the n-word around on their tongues.

As for Cantet himself, I wish there were more to say. He’s gradually revealed himself to be the Hilary Swank of Palme d’Or winners, showing a keen ability to ply his technical proficiency to high-concept projects (Human Resources, Time Out, The Class) without acquiring the qualities – subtlety, curiosity, artistic point of view – with which one builds a career. There’s a slick anonymity underpinning Arthur Rambo, suggesting that it was an inevitable film, something that someone would have made eventually. And more than anything, that is the trouble with Rambo, the idea that social media is like the weather, something we just have to deal with now and that there’s really no use complaining about. Come on, people. Why so serious? As Karim keeps insisting, “my generation gets it.” If you happen to be interested in larger questions about, say, the responsibilities that accompany public speech, or the cheapening of discourse when hits and likes become the quantification of success, Arthur Rambo has nothing much to offer aside from an eyeroll and an exasperated “OK boomer.”