Souleymane’s Story delivers a political fable with all the grit and urgency of a thriller. It follows a Guinean food-delivery driver (Abou Sangare, brilliant in his first screen role) who rides his bike through Paris’ busy streets with alarming haste. En route from client to client, he recites a script he plans to perform the next day at his asylum meeting. His pay is determined by how many jobs he completes, but a slice of those commissions are taken by the man who operates his account––and when money is needed (Souleymane remains in arrears to the man who wrote his script), he’s not always easy to pin down. Each day ticks like a time bomb, leading up to when the last bus leaves for Souleymane’s refugee shelter. Miss it and he sleeps rough. Run afoul of the delivery app’s anonymous moderators and his only source of income vanishes. Run afoul of the police and he’s on his own.
This nerve-shredder is the latest socio-political treatise from Boris Lojkine, director of Hope (which followed a young woman’s attempts to emigrate from Cameroon to Europe) and Camille (a biopic of the French photojournalist Camille Lepage, who died while covering the conflict in Central African Republic in 2014). Souleymane’s Story premiered in Un Certain Regard, where both Sangare and Lojkine were rightly rewarded for their efforts. It was, for my money, the best discovery of this year’s Cannes Film Festival and, somewhat ironically, exactly the kind of work that used to define it. Since the Dardenne brothers’ win with Rosetta in 1999, at least four Palme d’Ors have gone to titles of Rosetta‘s ilk, but that style of filmmaking has become desperately unfashionable. Souleymane suggests there may be life in it yet.
Along with Sangare’s electric lead turn, Lojkine’s film succeeds where others faltered in a few crucial places. Shot by DP Tristan Galand (who worked the camera department on a number of Dardenne projects, including the notably similar Two Days, One Night), Souleymane has a distinctive visual language and an impressive level of craft. (The image, shot from just behind, of Soulymane zipping down Parisian bike lanes was one of the most memorable in Cannes this year.) Even more apparent is the considered way Lojkine applies pressure, never pummeling his protagonist too hard, and also structuring the narrative like a Rube Goldberg Machine: if Souleyman can simply be left to do his job, make his deliveries, collect his pay, get some sleep, and make it to his interview on-time, all may be well and good; but if one domino fails to fall, will it be enough to breed catastrophe?
Best of all, Lojkine’s film comes with a refreshing generosity of spirit. There are bad-faith actors and opportunists in this world, the film admits, but the real enemy is in the system: how it is failing to protect people, both in terms of immigration and gig-economy work. And against the odds, that lack of a real on-screen antagonist leaves room for a great deal of warmth: even a couple of scenes that start off on the wrong foot (an anxious wait for a food order, having to trek up 5 flights of stairs) are given endearing twists. And one can sense the level of research that’s put in: the largely genial vibe of scenes in the refugee shelter; the moment when a chorus of alarms go off in the middle of the night to signal when beds are made available for the following evening; or the heart-wrenching moment when Souleymane calls the love he left behind. Like most things in Lojkine’s film, it all rings vitally true.
Souleymane’s Story screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.