A realistic and straightforward social drama is bolstered by a strong lead performance and accurate depictions of the unique burdens the informal economy can impose on those already struggling.
Everyone Souleymane (Abou Sangare) meets has an angle. The Guinean immigrant is a con man who cycles through the streets of Paris at all hours of the night, delivering food to raise the money needed to buy asylum papers and submit them to OFPRA (the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons). But while he has surrounded himself with a community of African immigrants who, in theory, are willing to guide him through the process, everyone's service comes at a price. And the services themselves aren't exactly worthy of boasting.
Director: Boris Lojkine
Writers: Boris Lojkine, Delphine Agut
Stars: Abou Sangare, Alpha Oumar Sow, Nina Meurisse
Without legal citizenship, he can't create his own account on any of the food delivery apps, so an acquaintance is kind enough to let Souleymane use his, receiving 50% of the earnings for his troubles, while Souleymane does 100% of the work. He also pays for advice for his upcoming immigration interview, though he's given the questionable advice of making up sob stories about attacks from political enemies to gain asylum—that is, when they aren't demanding even more money from him. Life is hard enough for an undocumented, homeless worker in the informal economy just trying to make ends meet, but his biggest problem might be the multitude of scammers who squeeze every last cent out of him.
Boris Lojkine's new film, "Souleymane's Story," follows the eponymous immigrant during the two days leading up to his asylum interview with the OFPRA. A straightforward, realistic social drama, it invokes the tradition of films like "I, Daniel Blake" and "Tori and Lokita" by illustrating the daunting tasks faced by vulnerable people as they navigate the government bureaucracies that are supposed to help them. But it also applies a modern twist to the subgenre by foregrounding the unique challenges posed by the informal economy.
Delivering food by bike is Souleymane's only source of income, but navigating Parisian traffic on cold, rainy nights is the least of his problems. He navigates between painfully slow restaurants, fickle customers who cancel orders on a whim, and elderly clients who don't understand the new security code system his service has implemented. All of these external delays negatively impact his rating with the app's powerful algorithm, which can lead to suspensions and delayed payments of money he's already promised to people across the city. The delivery sequences are almost Sean Baker-esque in depicting how poverty can turn any simple task into a screwball comedy, when everything seems to go wrong at every turn.
“Souleymane’s Story” doesn’t break new ground, and at times delves too deeply into the details of French immigration law, sacrificing universality for specificity, when a little less detail would have been more effective. However, it delivers exactly what its title promises: the story of a man navigating the ups and downs of the two most important days of his life before requesting permission to remain in France. Sangare embodies the character with appropriately frayed resilience, while Lokjine and co-writer Delphine Agut assault him with challenge after challenge that feels both surprising and inevitable.
Sometimes Souleymane feels like he’s running at full speed in a race with no finish line, and sometimes he crashes into an immovable wall. The film straddles these opposing outcomes, and its contradictions become its greatest strength in portraying the endless exhaustion of navigating a system that doesn't care about you as much as it claims.
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