Souleymane’s Story is a small, observant movie about a man who goes unobserved by so many of those around him. It zeroes in on the details of his daily life — he’s an immigrant, he’s trying to make ends meet, he’s applying for asylum — and in doing so, it ends up being about a whole system that swallows people up and strips them of their humanity.
From what we can tell, Souleymane is an honorable man. The movie doesn’t set him up as some kind of martyr, as a suffocatingly noble symbol of humanity in the face of oppression. He’s just trying to get by. As played by Abou Sangare in his first film role, Souleymane recently emigrated from Guinea to Paris. He works as a delivery guy, zipping around the city at all hours on his bike. In order to live, he has to work. In order to work, he needs an ID. But he can’t get an ID until he’s a naturalized citizen, and so he uses his friend’s delivery account and hopes it’ll go unnoticed.
All his routines are tied up in inconveniences like that. There are contradictions, too: Souleymane has to be in every-man-for-himself mode, but he’s also relying on a network of people who are similarly self-sufficient. They’re always running, scrambling, barely scraping by, being pulled in a dozen different directions at once.
While Souleymane bikes, we hear him reciting dates and incidents, possibly from his past, like an actor rehearsing lines. It turns out Souleymane has gone to a social worker who has given him a canned narrative: how he resisted eviction in his home country, how he became a leader in a progressive political movement, how he was arrested and tortured by the government, how he fled to Paris. He’s preparing to recite it for French immigration officials in a couple days, when his citizenship status will finally be determined.
It has to be specific, convincing, moving, even if it’s not entirely true. It’s the narrative he must spin in order to justify his very existence. The movie builds to Souleymane’s interview with a government agent played by Nina Meurisse: It’s a taut chamber piece of a scene, despite being quiet and measured and set in a nondescript bureaucratic office, and it not only reveals a lot about his character but about hers.
With its on-the-fly cinematography and its ability to find power in the mundane, Souleymane’s Story is most obviously reminiscent of films by the Dardennes brothers, whose portraits of contemporary France are often about the grinding degradation of being in the working class — or below it. These kinds of movies, rough-around-the-edges dramas about people on the fringes, can easily tip over into exploitation, as if the filmmaker is torturing his characters for our pity.
But director Boris Lojkine hasn’t made a one-note tragedy. Souleymane encounters as much hardship as kindness, usually in small gestures. As a showcase for first-timer Sangare, who won the best actor award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival (and who became a French citizen because of his work in this movie), the movie is especially impressive. Sangare makes us want to keep following Souleymane after his story has ended. What’s going to happen to him next? Where will he go? What will he do? That might be the highest compliment you can pay a movie.