J Paul Johnson
Souleymane’s Story might remind you for a moment of Bicycle Thieves. In Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 classic of Italian Neorealism, the protagonist is wholly dependent upon his bicycle, his sole mode of transportation, for employment; without it he cannot work, can barely survive. In Souleymane’s Story, the protagonist is equally dependent upon his bicycle for his work, but his predicament is even more dire. As a Guinean immigrant in Paris hustling to make food deliveries on his bicycle, Souleymane (Abou Sangare) is desperately hoping to earn enough to avoid sleeping on the streets. His upcoming immigration hearing will determine whether he can stay. Told in the best Dardenne Brothers-style neo-Neorealist style, Souleymane’s Story is deeply arresting and profound, an immigrant tale that crosses borders with meanings equally profound on both sides of the Atlantic and across the world.
Souleymane’s predicament is taut and full of near-constant crisis, though his day-to-day experience never feels sensationalized. He’s taken on the account of a documented immigrant to make his deliveries, but has to do so at a breakneck pace across the rain-soaked streets of Paris’s arrondissements. Of the few euros he earns for each delivery, most will go to the account holder, as Souleymane is promised only a portion. Aside from dodging traffic and pedestrians while making his deliveries, he is, unsurprisingly, subject to the casual disdain for service workers and immigrants, not to mention the very real threat of harassment by police or potential deportation.
While a delayed or rejected delivery can cost Souleymane precious minutes and euros, he’s got an even more pressing concern on his mind. His upcoming asylum interview is the make-or-break moment for Guinean immigrants, determining whether he will be allowed to stay or deported. The Guineans rely on a coach of sorts who establishes for them a template to memorize and rehearse, a detailed tale of resistance, arrest, and imprisonment that is designed to earn them political asylum. It comes at a cost—the coach demands compensation for his services in an everyone-gets-theirs economy—and it is, simply, a lie.
Souleymane, then, is living doubly dangerously. He’s living one lie, pretending to be the account holder to make his food deliveries, and he’s rehearsing another, the labored fiction he’s readying to tell at his asylum hearing. Given his increasingly desperate state—his bike is damaged in an accident, he’s ripped off by his manager, and then he’s injured in a fight by the time he arrives—it’s impossible to imagine his interview will be successful.
Souleymane’s Story never leaves the character’s side, not even for a moment. It’s an approach that places a high premium on the actor’s ability to convey thought and emotion, and Sangare is well up to the task. An immigrant mechanic who had himself migrated to France when still a minor, Sangare conveys Souleymane’s confusion, despair, and determination adeptly. His French is halting, his understanding of the system limited, his pain palpable; that he is, in effect, lying about his past to earn legal status makes his dilemma more complex but no less real. Do those who misrepresent themselves, who aim to game the system intentionally, deserve asylum?
Sangare is, like most of the cast, a nonprofessional actor, cast for his own lived experience. Nina Meurisse, who plays the sympathetic immigration representative who conducts Souleymane’s asylum interview, is the exception, and her performance in the film’s long and tense climactic scene equals Sangare’s. Like his casting and his narrative, Boris Lojkine’s direction takes a Neorealist approach, eschewing nondiegetic music and letting each scene follow organically from the prior until Souleymane’s fragile fiction can simply no longer hold.
To Lojkine’s credit and, for that matter, Sangare’s, Souleymane’s Story is deeply arresting, an affecting tale of one man’s ill-fated attempt to game a system all too rigged against him. It’s situated in a precise context—that of Guineans seeking asylum in France—but its implications are universal. In the US, immigration control has been authorized with more funds than ever before: $45 billion for new detention centers, a 265 percent annual budget and 62 percent larger budget than the entire federal prison system. The goal: to imprison, then deport or conscript into servitude, some 100,000-plus non-citizens daily.
Souleymane’s Story has already won acclaim and awards, including Best Actor for Sangare at Cannes. What I wouldn’t do for every American to be required watch it, to confront more directly and personally the complexities of immigration, the inefficiencies of its bureaucracies and the dehumanizing aspects of its policies and processes. I wish films like Souleymane’s Story and other recent well-told stories of immigration and diaspora like the Dardennes’ Tori and Lokita, Palestine’s 200 Meters, Mexico’s Sansón and Me, Iran’s, No Bears, Venezuela’s The Box, or the Ukrainian documentaries House Made of Splinters and In the Rearview registered with more viewers here. What Lojkine does here isn’t all that unlike what de Sica and the other neorealists were doing a cinematic lifetime ago: making film to fight the rule of fascism, and doing so in a uniquely arresting and convincing style. I can’t make everyone watch Souleymane’s Story, but I can surely implore everyone, no matter where they are, to watch this and films like it the first chance they get.
