Les Diables (2002), a film directed by French filmmaker Christophe Ruggia, is a marvelous work about two lost children adrift—Joseph and Chloé—who, having been abandoned at birth, flee from the rest of the world. Chloé—showing clear signs of autism—is outside the world; she does not speak, she cannot bear to be touched, and she only follows Joseph’s orders. For Joseph, Chloé has become the only valuable thing in his desolate existence, and he protects her against the rest of the world. Incapable of differentiating aggression from assistance and aid, Joseph is convinced that when they find their parents' house—the house that Chloé incessantly builds with mosaic pieces as part of her stereotyped autistic behaviour—all pain and suffering will vanish, as in a reunion with the mythical original object, and his supposed sister will magically be cured.
In their own way, they are two wild, free children living in a world of their own, outside the social bond. Two beings, alone and helpless, facing an environment to which they do not belong and which they perceive as looking at them like the excrement of a mother who failed to link them to the human order, turning them into waste destined for purely bureaucratic and unaffectionate institutionalization. This institutional fate will be experienced as a barrier between them—confronted by the norms and laws of the human species—and their happiness, eventually rising as an insurmountable wall that will prevent their integration and the establishing of an identity that could save them from marginalization.
Much like the masterful La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) or Le Thé au harem d'Archimède (Mehdi Charef, 1985) before it, Les Diables is a film that masterfully explores the social conflict between marginalized youth and authority in the suburbs of Paris or Marseille in modern-day France. Yet, at the same time, it focuses less on the psychosocial factors that lead the characters to delinquency and marginalization, and more on those factors that lead to a structural psychological conflict.
The director—Christophe Ruggia—is currently canceled and under house arrest, wearing an electronic monitoring anklet, after being accused by actress Adèle Haenel of seducing and sexually abusing her when she was twelve years old, precisely when Les Diables was filmed (Adèle Haenel is Chloé).
Perhaps, just as it happened to his "devils," the director also found himself trapped in his search for the mythical object. But unlike them—who resist submitting to the Law and the "Name of the Father"—he chose to mock it, simulating only a submission characteristic of the perverse conduct that led him to become one who does not renounce enjoyment, but rather feels like a winner where everyone else—psychotics and neurotics—have failed. A stage director who knows how to transgress the Law and will not hesitate to assume the role of the omnipotent Other in his thirst for power—becoming legislator and legalist, judge and prevaricator, priest and pedophile, politician and corrupt official—someone aware that "where there's a law, there's a loophole." He exercises power without inhibition, seducing and submitting others, turning them into desiring subjects, and avoiding the anxiety provoked by a constitutive desire that would confront him with the Law and his own castration anxiety.
Were the devils partly right in their distorted and atrocious perception of the world of others?
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