Samba.

The latest collaboration from directors and co-writers Oliver Nakache and Eric Toledano following 2011’s Intouchables is another story of human interest this time a cross between a serious social drama and a romantic comedy. It involves the life of an illegal migrant originally from Senegal Samba Cisse who has lived with his uncle in France since he arrived ten years ago and has virtually qualified as a Chef. After a routine police check he is detained not knowing if he can stay in France or if he will have to return to his family back in Senegal to whom he regularly sends money enabling their survival. Placed in a detention centre he meets Alice an emotionally vulnerable inexperienced advocate who along with her sister will represent Samba at a tribunal. A relationship gradually develops between the damaged Alice and the handsome trainee chef.  

 

Omar Sy as Samba.

Charlotte Gainsbourg as Alice. 

Although ostensibly a comedy we get to witness the struggle that migrant’s have in rich European country’s that refuses to grant them papers that would make their stay legal but are prepared to exploit them. During the movie we meet others in the same position as Samba. There’s Jonas who followed the love of his life to France with the intention of marriage, we meet Wilson, supposedly a Brazilian, who teams up with Samba when he loses his job at the restaurant after his arrest. They both do the rounds of ‘low wage’ employers who do not look too closely at their forged ID cards!

 

Samba shares a light hearted moment with Wilson. 

The film stars Omar Sy as Samba, an artiste who became the first person of African descent to win a Cesar Award for Best Actor for his role in the Intouchables and who also appeared in the extremely enjoyable French comedy Micmacs in 2009. Movie Ramble favourite Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Alice with another award winning actor Tahar Rahim, best known for his role of Malik in Jacques Audiards A Prophet (2009) plays Wilson. I really enjoyed this movie and would suggest the negative critiques that you have probable read should be ignored - just enjoy this well-meaning film and the joyously engaging performance from Omar Sy. 

https://youtu.be/ny1nGig5C7w

Le Passé (The Past).

Berenice Bejo has redeemed herself after the dreadful The Artist (2011) in a film where she is not only central to the story but in my opinion carries the film. Bejo plays Marie a woman whose demeanour emphasizes the meaning of stress, a woman who is about to go through her second divorce, She is pregnant again to Samir who shares her house located in a working class suburb of Paris, along with her 16 year old daughter Lucie (Pauline Burlet) with whom see has no rapport, her youngest daughter Lea and his own rather disturbed son Fouad. Samir’s wife Celine has attempted to commit suicide and now is in a hospital bed in a coma and is not expected to survive. Enter Marie’s second husband Ahmad who she has not seen for four years, invited back to the family home to go through divorce proceedings but while he is there he is expected to solve Marie’s problems: work out why Lucie will not converse with her mother and advice on whether Samir is the right man to become her third husband. Not an easy task under such demanding circumstances.

 

Ahmad is expected to solve Marie's problems....

Asghar Farhadi latest movie, Le Passé (2013) follows the release in Europe of two very successful films, 2009’s About Elly and the much-respected award winning A Separation (2011) up there with the best of recent World Cinema releases and a film against which all his future body of work will be judged.

 

....including why her daughter will not speak to her....

This week first time host George Geddes, who I must say made a great job of it, introduced Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre Film Club screening of Le Passé. George pointed out to an attentive audience that the idea behind the Film Club was to enable film lovers to see good quality movies that were a little different from the popcorn and soft drink variety seen at mainstream theatres and this week’s film was a good example. He went on to tell us that this was the first of Farhadi’s six films to be shot outside of Iran, this time the location was Paris and its suburb of Sevran north east of the capital. (We gratefully avoid the Paris of Woody Allen!)  Written by this multi talented director it had to be translated from its native Persian to French. Other than the politics, western audiences are not familiar with Iran, only what we get to see from the heavily censored work of brave directors like Asghar Farhadi[1]. Although our host did point out that America operates its own censorship by not showing films from country’s it does not like!

 

....and whether she should marry the sullen Samir.

This ‘gently paced’ sombre movie did appear to be very much appreciated by the RBCFT audience when the movie was discussed after its screening but they were not very forth coming when asked why? But eventually agreed that the acting was very good and that the two younger children (Elyes Aguis and Jeanne Justin) played their roles with extreme professionalism and they were also greatly intrigued by the twists and turns of the story. But our knowledgeable audience did criticise the veracity of the undertitles.

 

Cannes 2013 where the film picked up two awards. 

I was not so sure, nothing wrong with the acting as I have said previously Bejo, who won Best Actress at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, was extremely good along with her fellow actors French born Tahar Rahim as the unsmiling Samir, an actor whose face is getting very well-known on the big screen with leading roles in A Prophet (2009), Free Men (2011) and Grand Central (2013), and the Iranian actor and director Ali Mosaffa who takes the part of Ahmad. And I did agree with what one critic opined that this fraught story was like a two-hour episode of the BBC series EastEnders with its microcosm of reallot. Sometimes you can’t always explain why a particular a film does not draw you in and this one certainly did not. Also I could not raise any sympathy for the characters, excluding the children who are always ‘the victims’ in any disenfranchised relationship, who all seemed to be failed human beings in some respect even the ‘too good to be true’ Ahmad whose past misdemeanours were only hinted at. But I believe that from reading various reviews that I am in the minority – still you can’t win them all.

---

[1] In a recent interview regarding creative restrictions in Iran Asghar Farhadi commented as follows: “There is a limitation for everybody. Each filmmaker before making his movies has to send their script to have it validated, and then once the film is made you repeat the same process. But then you have this question: why do so many good films come out of the country even though web have this system? When everyone looks at this progress, they are only focused on the power of censorship; they forget the creative power of the filmmakers. There is a permanent struggle between the two: sometimes it’s the censorship that wins, sometimes it’s the filmmakers”

Grand Central.

Although interestingly described as a romantic drama set against the dangers of the nuclear power industry, Grand Central (2013) was a wee bit of a let down. Co-written and directed by Rebecca Zlotowski it does however have a powerful cast headed up by Lea Seydoux who won very high praise in one of the best films of 2013 Blue is the Warmest Colour and Tahar Rahim who was in the award winning French prison drama A Prophet (2009) and also took the lead in Free Men (2011) which tells the largely untold story of the role the Muslims played in the French resistance and the rescue of Jews from under the noses of the German occupation.

 

Illicit meetings by the river. 

Gary Manda (Rahim) is an unskilled and therefore expendable worker who gets a job in a nuclear power plant to clean and repair nuclear reactors. He works under the supervision of veteran Gilles (Oliver Gourment), a man whose family has left him because of the pressures of his job, and Toni (Denis Menochet) who lives with, and plans to marry, Karole (Seydoux) an attractive sad looking women who also works at the plant. Radiation contamination is a daily risk and if a workers radiation levels rise they not only loose their job but there is a good chance of getting a cancer related disease. Adding to this sense of danger Gary has fallen for Karole whose illicit meeting’s on the riverbank has not gone unnoticed by the other men.

Testing radiation levels.

This is unfortunately an unfulfilling film that promises a lot but delivers little considering the importance attached to its subject matter. The story does not really go anywhere and is difficult to follow at times. But Rebecca Zlotowski should be commended for showing us a world that the majority of us were unaware of.

Free Men (Des hommes libres).

The Great Mosque Paris.

Occupied Paris 1942. Like many fellow Algerian’s Younes has come to the city to find work and locate his cousin Ali who is a union agitator and a resistance fighter. When the French police arrest him for black market activities they offer him a way to stay out of prison by spying on Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit the rector of Paris’s Great Mosque. The authorities suspect that the Mosque and its rector are providing false identity papers for Jews and on some occasions hiding people in the cellars below the main building. At the Mosque Younes meets a young good-looking singer Salim, who turns out to be Jewish and Leila a committed communist.  Both of who help to change Younes outlook on life and consequently persuade him to not only renounces his undercover work for the police but to play a greater part in the resistance.

 

Younes and the Rector.

The French actor of Algerian origin, Tahar Rahim best known for his role as Malik El Djebena in the 2009 award-winning French movie A Prophet, plays Younes, with well-known veteran French actor Michael Lonsdale, who played another religious figure in Of Gods and Men (2010) to great effect, as the rector.

 

Salim and Leila.

French-Moroccan film director Ismael Ferroukhi mixes fact and fiction to tell this thought provoking but little known story of the Paris Mosque that supplied North African Jews with forged Muslim identification papers under the long noses of the Gestapo. Like two similar films before it, Days of Glory (2006) and Outside the Law (2010) it gave false hope to the Algerians that fought along side the French against the Germans during World War 2 for independence from French colonial rule, something they had to fight their until 1962.