There’s a grand tradition in French art of celebrating the poetic outlaw. Shocking the bourgeoisie with some avant-garde aesthetic is a badge of honor. You can read it in the 15th-century murder ballads of Francois Villon or in the tainted love between the “cursed poets” Verlaine and Rimbaud. You can behold it in all those gloriously bold and vivid brushstrokes of the Romantic painters or from the multicolored gallery of Les Fauves, aka “wild beasts.” Cinematically, this subversive panache appears in films by Jean Vigo, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jean-Pierre Melville. But, crucially, all that aesthetic rebellion must be linked with political urgency — a desire to show the unwilling public the lives of those they would otherwise refuse to acknowledge, respect, or understand. As a legendary enclave of artists, Paris rightfully boasts of a proudly sophisticated and cosmopolitan style. Unfortunately, all that tres chic glamor sometimes overshadows the seething ethnic and economic tensions that crackle beneath the city of light.