Dress like a European or you'll be spotted

Dress like a European or you'll be spotted
Dress like a European or you'll be spotted
Anonim

Eletrevalós director duo Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano have once again directed a comedy/drama focusing on a very current social problem, which is at least as good as its popular predecessor as an audience film. What are the chances of an immigrant leaving his homeland in a completely foreign country? What kind of job opportunities can you expect and what existential problems can you encounter? - such and similar questions are raised by Samba.

Samba (Omar Sy), the Senegalese immigrant, has been in Paris for ten years, lives off odd jobs, and an approx. he shares a ten-square-meter apartment with his nearly sixty-year-old uncle. When he requests a residence permit because of a job offer, he is imprisoned by the immigration office, and since he is in the country illegally with false papers, he is immediately taken to a prison-like institution reserved for immigrants. Here he meets Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who works as a social worker for therapeutic reasons, with whom he immediately develops a special relationship.

Photo: Gaumont Distribution
Photo: Gaumont Distribution

The film shows well how an immigrant living in constant anxiety and insecurity for years lives, who goes from job to job, is forced to avoid the bus stop after six in the evening, and gets goosebumps just by seeing a civil servant in uniform. It is impossible to bear the constant pressure without goals: this is why Samba and his uncle dream of a house by the lake, which they plan to buy when they have enough money to finally return home to Africa.

The characters of the main characters, Samba and Alice, are quite similar: they both struggle to break out of their dead-end lives. Samba will do anything to be able to work again and support the family he left behind in Africa, and Alice is trying to start her life over. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays well the restrained, but at the same time, brutal outbursts of anger former workaholic, who is completely changed by the closeness of the relaxed, good-humored Samba. I admit, at first I was quite afraid that I would keep looking for Driss from Lifers in Omar Sy's performance, but during the film I never once thought of the eccentric nurse: Sy showed a completely different, at least equally professional face as a Senegalese refugee, to which - for the sake of the authenticity of the portrayal - he even picked up an accent. By the way, Nakache and Toledano not only kept Sy from Lifetime, but also Clotilde Mollet, we can see her as an employee of an employment agency.

Photo: Gaumont Distribution
Photo: Gaumont Distribution

And speaking of actors: Tahar Rahim, who plays Wilson, an Algerian immigrant pretending to be Brazilian, is at least as entertaining as Sy and Gainsbourg combined. Not to mention that it was quite a good move on the part of the directors to bring in the character of the entertaining black worker, who solves particularly tense situations well with his eccentric jokes.

Although the story is basically about the daily doubts and bleak future of an immigrant, the directors managed to combine life-smelling drama and romantic comedy without the film tipping over into some kitschy, predictable, cliche comedy. It's a shame that the ending was so clumsy as the story was consciously built: I particularly enjoyed that the directors managed to get to know the characters gradually thanks to the slow character development, but at the end of the film the initial momentum ran out and the threads were sewn up pretty damn quickly. It's a disappointment, because up to three quarters of the film we saw completely authentic life situations, but at the end there isn't enough time left for problem solving and transition.

Photo: Gaumont Distribution
Photo: Gaumont Distribution

Regardless, it is quite likely that viewers will like Samba at least as much as Élétrevalós. The choice of topics that particularly affect the French holds a crooked mirror in front of their fundamentally xenophobic society in relation to the refugee and immigrant issue, which is now impossible to ignore. The film authentically presents the chances of an immigrant from a completely different culture in a country where, although tolerated, his determination is not unconditionally valued, his employment is made difficult, and his opportunity to move up is denied. And the most interesting suggestion: what if two people from completely different social backgrounds fall in love?

Samba has already been presented once here as part of the Francophone Film Days, but from March 19 it will also be played in cinemas nationwide. Perhaps it will not only hold up a mirror to the French.

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