DRAMA; 1hr 34min (French, Fula and Maninka with subtitles)
STARRING: Abou Sangaré, Alpha Oumar Sow, Emmanuel Yovanie
Shades of blue: Sangaré
Food-delivery courier Souleymane (Sangaré) pedals his pushbike night and day through the streets of a Paris disinclined to go easy on him in this 2024 Cannes Jury and Performance Prize–winner. If anybody deserves a break, it’s this all-but-invisible outlier, victim of both the gig economy that employs him under the table and the lack of residency status in a country that very well may not want him.
In every sense, Souleymane is a long way from the home he left in Guinea-Conakry, yet despite his sick mother and a sweetheart (Keita Diallo) who looks set to marry someone else, he has no immediate intention — or means — of returning. His game plan is to seek asylum in France, a goal towards which he slogs and slogs like a man possessed, trapped in the thankless service of attempting to scrape a living. His asylum interview is due in two days but the by-rote coaching in political oppression he is getting from the brusque fellow Guinean (Oumar Sow), whom he can’t afford to reimburse, isn’t sticking the way it should. And when the man whose identity he uses in order to be able to work (Yovanie) refuses to reimburse him for his hours of drudgery, Souleymane is cast out from what little security he has.
Director and co-writer Boris Lojkine and cinematographer Tristan Garland stay close to their drowning man, who is the centre of every scene. Lojkine and co-screenwriter Delphine Agut’s meshing of newcomer Sangaré’s personal experience with the ordeal of his character adds fuel to an already scorching fire, with Souleymane’s pain and purpose the burning thread that pulls the jagged pieces together. Like a circle of Hell, his journey loops back to where it began as he waits in trepidation to be called to bureaucratic account. With stakes this high, that bone-dry process is even more excruciating than the dehumanising grind it took to get him there.
