Review by Beatrice On 26-Jun-2024
Every technical problem can be solved if there is enough time and money. Corollary: there is never enough time and money.
Souleymane is an African rider: in two days, he has the interview that will allow him to obtain the asylum he requested and the documents.
He must prepare for it even though he does not ask for an interpreter, as he speaks good French.
He moves throughout the city to make food pickups and deliveries but must use an account rented for 120 euros a week including the bank account where payments are credited.
He is surrounded by people, including his countrymen, who take advantage of this situation and anyone who asks him for money to offer him services he needs.
On one hand, there is solidarity among colleagues; on the other, it shows how the system produces parasitic elements that survive off the bureaucracy to which refugees are subjected.
No one has time to help those in need, and even he, given the frantic and alienating life he leads, will find himself without time to devote to those in his same condition.
We know little about this boy, what emerges is his calmness, his unstoppable endurance despite the daily unlivability.
Everything takes place in Paris, in two days, during which besides work, the welfare state service provided for these refugees who can make use of dormitories, canteens, services is also evident.
Obviously, everything is represented as a mechanism that needs to ensure a system that guarantees the slavery of the new working class.
No representation of the odyssey of the journey that brought the boy to France, after passing through Nigeria, the Sahara, Libya, Italy, and then France, which we will only find out about in the final interview.
The exhausting past of the journey reappears every day in Parisian everyday life, where total indifference, speculation, exploitation, the cynicism of merchants, the indifference of customers reign.
A film that exhausts you, despite you being seated on a comfortable armchair:
Souleymane runs between one delivery and another, between one delay and another, between the facial recognition of the account by the renter,
between the metro ride and booking the bus for migrants to reach the dormitory, between one accident and another, between the customer who does not accept the package because it is crumpled and this will cause his account, moreover not his own, to be closed, without which he cannot work, between memorizing the prepackaged speech by a speculator and the reality of facts more dramatic than fiction.
Souleymane is struggle and resilience, is in search of transforming the scam of life into a life to be reinvented, because he has a goal that we will only know a little before the credits, when he is asked, for the first time, to speak sincerely, maybe, and hopefully maybe, because there is someone evaluating him with a minimum capacity to listen.
The mystifications to which he has been indoctrinated are standardized but he does not know that only his true story could save him.
The relativism of the destinies of these boys is extreme and the capacity of this film to represent it is radical: the socio-economic contradictions within contemporary society highlight the accent on structural injustices and disparities in power that permeate everyday reality.
It is not only the long journey that they will have to face surviving or not but everything they will have to live through once they arrive.
Director Boris Lojkine uses an intense and realistic visual narration to convey the desperation and determination of the refugees, highlighting the human and political implications of an increasingly relevant global phenomenon.
With Tori and Lokita by the Dardennes we had experienced this drama, here Tori has grown up and we know what happened to Lokita.
A sharp critique of the global capitalist system through which the dominant economic forces perpetuate the cycle of poverty and oppression, the inhumanity of the perpetrators that turns back on the victims allowing and fueling the vicious circle of headless cruelty, generally unaware to most.
The unstoppable system averts its gaze from the purposeless character:
Ethics in the face of technique becomes pathetic: it has never been seen that an impotence is capable of stopping a power. The problem is: not what we can do with the technical tools we have devised, but what technique can do to us.
26-Jun-2024 by Beatrice