The Piercing Immigrant Drama of “Souleymane’s Story”

The title of the brand new movie from the French director and screenwriter Boris Lojkine, “Souleymane’s Story,” has just a few entwined meanings. Within the broadest sense, it describes the film itself: that is the story of Souleymane (Abou Sangaré), an undocumented immigrant from Guinea-Conakry, who resides in Paris. He’s looking for asylum by the French Workplace for the Safety of Refugees and Stateless Individuals (OFPRA), which is the place the title’s second that means arises. Souleymane’s utility requires an in-person interview, and he plans to inform a fabricated story concerning the circumstances that despatched him overseas: particularly, that he was pressured to flee Guinea after being arrested and imprisoned for political activism. The supply of this story is a person named Barry (Alpha Oumar Sow), who coaches refugees like Souleymane to lie of their interviews for sympathetic and dramatic impact, and even provides them with false paperwork which may corroborate these lies.When Souleymane rehearses his account, in an early scene, Barry admonishes him for blandly reciting (and sometimes bungling) the false information he’s been given. “It has to sound like your life expertise,” he says. “Go into element, as a result of particulars rely.” In invoking the variations between a believable story and a clearly phony one, “Souleymane’s Story” units itself one thing of a problem. In any case, Lojkine’s film, which he co-wrote with Delphine Agut, is itself a tightly focussed, rigorously constructed fiction. It begins with a ticking-clock premise—Souleymane’s interview is in simply two days—that pressurizes, in generic but efficient vogue, an already fraught set of private circumstances. The movie’s appreciable energy relies upon solely on its moment-to-moment persuasiveness, on a set of narrative and aesthetic selections that, as introduced—in a collection of swift, kinetically composed, and jaggedly edited scenes—seldom really feel like selections in any respect.Particulars do rely for the whole lot right here, and Lojkine deploys them skillfully, with a watch towards immersing us in his protagonist’s gruelling on a regular basis routine. Souleymane works as a courier, and he spends most of his days crisscrossing the town on his bike, choosing up and dropping off meals deliveries. (Lojkine and his cinematographer, Tristan Galand, shot a lot of the footage by chasing after Sangaré on bikes of their very own.) However Souleymane’s difficulties transcend the standard indignities of scant pay and exhausting hours. As a result of he can’t work legally, he makes use of the delivery-platform account of one other courier, Emmanuel (Emmanuel Yovanie), who takes the lion’s share of Souleymane’s meagre earnings. On a mean day, Souleymane may need to cycle miles out of his technique to safe a selfie from Emmanuel, in order to bypass the platform’s built-in safety system. On a tough night, he would possibly get right into a verbal altercation with a restaurateur who retains him ready too lengthy for an order. Or he would possibly get knocked off his bike, spoiling a supply and additional decreasing Emmanuel’s all-important customer-satisfaction ranking. Even the smallest setback exacerbates a vicious cycle of chaos and failure, one which scarcely ends when Souleymane heads to a homeless shelter for the evening and finds himself nonetheless competing, not for deliveries however for a mattress and a bathe.The movie pointedly avoids flashbacks to Souleymane’s life in Guinea; like all sincere fiction, it doesn’t fake to grant us greater than a partial view of occasions. And these narrative elisions gesture towards the third and most elusive that means of the title, which considerations Souleymane’s true story: the fact of his life till now, and the individuals and locations he left behind in pursuit of a greater life overseas. We’re given just a few glancing insights into these sacrifices, primarily by Souleymane’s telephone calls again dwelling. He speaks together with his girlfriend, Kadiatou (Keita Diallo), who longs to be with him once more, however whose endurance is being examined by one other man’s proposal of marriage. Souleymane additionally tries to examine in repeatedly on his ailing mom, whose situation, we sense—from the commingling of urgency and tenderness in his voice—is essential to his causes for coming to France within the first place.As a imaginative and prescient of a life ruled, relentlessly, by an unholy late-capitalist fusion of smartphone apps and human appetites—and in addition by the unyielding restrictions of Métro routes and bus schedules—“Souleymane’s Story” is perhaps essentially the most despairingly granular portrait of the gig financial system at work since “Sorry We Missed You” (2020), Ken Loach’s drama concerning the escalating miseries of a middle-aged supply driver. However Lojkine’s movie, for all its blunt power, additionally has fleeting situations of reduction, and it presents them, for essentially the most half, with a clever lack of inflection or emphasis. There are restaurant employees who, quite than yelling at Souleymane or brushing him apart, provide him a smile, a espresso, a chunk of sweet. There’s a frail older buyer who gratefully accepts a pizza supply, and whose want for bodily help awakens Souleymane’s personal compassion. There’s even an arbitrary act of mercy by just a few cops who discover that Souleymane is utilizing another person’s account when he delivers their meals order: they proceed to mock and harass him however then let him go, too hungry to hassle with him additional. That is hardly kindness however, watching Lojkine’s movie now, as ICE raids of indiscriminate cruelty and violence sweep throughout the U.S., it nearly looks like it.I’m cautious of the important impulse to reward a film on grounds of timeliness, however the relevance of “Souleymane’s Story”—what it evokes and illuminates concerning the hurdles that undocumented immigrants face the world over—will not be merely plain but additionally inextricable from the circumstances of the movie’s creation. Sangaré himself emigrated from Guinea as a teen-ager and had by no means acted onscreen earlier than “Souleymane’s Story”; though the film isn’t biographical, he has spoken in interviews concerning the challenges of his early years in France, and the way they dovetail with Souleymane’s. The casting of a gifted nonprofessional actor is hardly a rarity in films; it’s certainly one of a number of choices right here that talk to the indelible affect of the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose tense and exacting dramatic thrillers—amongst them the migrant dramas “La Promesse” (1997) and “Tori and Lokita” (2023)—have made them world normal bearers within the cinema of working-class desperation. (Lojkine, just like the Dardennes, started his movie profession making documentaries, and his dedication to realism has prolonged to his fiction work, beginning together with his 2014 function, “Hope,” about two migrants, one Nigerian and one Cameroonian, making the arduous trek throughout the Sahara towards Europe.)One of many first belongings you discover about Sangaré’s efficiency is its pedal-pumping physicality: the actor, panting as he threads his approach by Paris site visitors, conveys excessive anxiousness and a will to work intensely exhausting. Slowly, although, a extra vivid sense of who Souleymane is takes root. We glean his quiet charisma, his easy good humor, and his principled refusal to return insults or abuses in type. We see how essentially sincere he’s, and thus how temperamentally ill-suited he’s to regurgitating the falsehoods that, as Barry insists, are essential to his survival. As an actor, in brief, Sangaré—whose efficiency gained a European Movie Award, a César, and a clutch of pageant prizes—is an awfully expressive discover. He has nonetheless proclaimed his intent to proceed working as an auto mechanic, a job he educated for in his teenagers in Paris, however which, with out his papers, he was unable to do till now: earlier this yr, after three rejected requests for a visa, Sangaré was lastly granted a one-year allow to stay and work in France.Whether or not a equally auspicious destiny awaits his fictional counterpart is unclear. Lojkine cuts to black earlier than we will discover out, although not till after a panoramic sequence by which Souleymane has his fateful interview. The dialog is carried out by an unnamed OFPRA agent, who’s performed, with quietly beautiful poise, by Nina Meurisse. As she questions Souleymane, her eyes darting between his face and her laptop display screen as she varieties out his responses, we sense an instinctive kindness that’s each articulated and held in examine; skilled protocol restricts her from any direct expression of empathy, but it surely additionally permits her to inform him, with utter sincerity, that she is there to take heed to him and him alone. What ensues is an awfully sustained actors’ duet, culminating—by the mutual modulation of Sangaré’s pained, awkward, halting supply and Meurisse’s grave, unwavering calm—in an astounding second of ethical and emotional readability. For Souleymane to outlive till this level has required no finish of deception and pressure, however in the long run, if just for one thrilling second, it truly is the reality that units him free. ♦