Souleymane’s Story is an intimate, powerful and moving chronicle of life on the margins. Directed by Boris Lojkine, and written by Lojkine and Delphine Agut, the much-decorated film follows a Guinean immigrant over three frantic days in Paris as he works as a food-delivery rider and prepares for a crucial asylum interview.
Souleymane’s situation is as precarious as John McClane’s in any Die Hard movie, but without the glamour and dirty vest. Each night he must rebook a spot in a homeless shelter. Each day he navigates app-driven gig work, unpredictable weather and impossible deadlines.
His bicycle, like that of the hero of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, is not just transport but the key to his job and stability. Should it break or get stolen, his life and future will fall apart.
Lojkine’s focus is less on loss and more on the pressure of simply getting by. Sometimes that means illegally sleeping on a stairway. The film studiously avoids melodrama. It doesn’t ask us to pity Souleymane or ponder the complexities of borders. Instead it shows how the apparatus – immigration, work, housing – is stacked against people like him. To apply for asylum he must memorise a made-up story about political persecution, because the truth simply won’t be enough.
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Abou Sangaré, a first-time actor, rightly won Cannes’ Un Certain Regard award for his restrained performance. In real life the actor arrived in France at the age of 16; lacking permanent legal status, he has used his Cannes win to appeal for the right to work as a mechanic.
He carries the film with buried expressions of fatigue, toil and quiet hope. The camera follows him through the streets, capturing the alienation and lonely rhythms of his routine. Tristan Galand’s over-the-shoulder cinematography and the script’s naturalistic pacing echo the style of the Dardenne brothers and European social-realist classics.
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There are brief moments of kindness, whether from other migrants, a kebab-shop owner or another shelter resident, but they’re small exceptions in a world that mostly neither cares nor notices. This is a nervy study of how poverty wears people down, eroded by uncertainty and the grinding effort to stay afloat.
In cinemas from Friday, October 17th
