Nakache, who wrote the scattered screenplay, have a well-honed touch for comic beats and a feel for workaday details. Around them buzzes a small circle of side characters - Samba’s boisterous friend (Tahar Rahim) and pessimistic uncle, and the kibitzing staff members at the immigration center, who seem to be descended from a 1930s Hollywood comedy set in New York. That might sound like a glib evaluation, but the filmmakers are shameless in leavening Samba’s woes with blushing scenes between him and Alice, who seems instantly mesmerized. Nakache provide an entry point for viewers who sympathize with the plight of migrants, or harbor crushes on them. Gainsbourg’s clueless Alice, a corporate drone taking a stress-related sabbatical by working at an immigration center, Mr. Sy’s tenacious but somewhat opaque Samba plays out the absurdities of hard-working residents who don’t have the right papers. Hovering between the insider and outsider perspectives the two characters represent, the filmmakers Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache deliver a mostly buoyant take on the immigration travails that preoccupy France today (and more and more of its movies). But Samba is worth celebrating for its amicable and inquisitive visit to an underworld which, in most French films, would be grimly tooled up with guns and knives.Directed by the team behind the hit French odd-couple comedy “ The Intouchables,” the breezy “ Samba” centers on a Senegalese immigrant (Omar Sy) and his caseworker (Charlotte Gainsbourg). As Samba, Omar Sy suggests a coy and vulnerable heart inside a burly frame.Īs a love story the film doesn’t have quite enough va-va-voom, while the enigmatic ending feels like a misstep. With silent moues, Gainsbourg delightfully captures the air of a wounded animal seeking to back away from the headlights, apart from one memorable public explosion. The result is addiction to sleeping pills and wide-eyed diffidence. Alice, the film quietly suggests, is as much a prisoner of a stratified society which requires her to don a business suit adn conform. Later they flee the police by comically hot-footing it shoelessly over Paris’s rooftops.Īt the heart of the film is a tentative romance between Samba and Alice, who spend much of their joint screen time shyly misconnecting. He pals up with Walid aka Wilson ( Tahar Rahim), an Algerian masquerading as a Brazilian (to have more success with the ladies), who does the erotic dance from the Coke ad as they dangle from a wobbly window-cleaning gantry halfway up a high rise office block. “To leave France I go that way?” Samba screams when denied the right to remain and released from detention facility next to the airport. The script, by Delphine and Muriel Coulin with additional dialogue by the directors, even has a soft spot for mordant farce. In another telling, the tale of an illegal immigrant on the run in the big city might seek to tear at your heartstrings, but Samba declares itself as a comedy the second Alice’s brassy colleague Manu (Izïa Higelin, pictured) sets off a metal detector with a pair of piercings below the midriff. His case handler Alice ( Charlotte Gainsbourg) is a nervous sociopath working pro bono after suspension from her proper job following a violent meltdown. Samba ( Omar Sy), whose name keeps changing whenever he needs a new ID, has been working in Paris for a decade, but is facing extradition back to Senegal. In a minute directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano have deftly ferried us into the world of the invisible Parisian underclass. A splendid tracking shot which opens the film moves through a blingy hotel from the choreographed celebrations of a very white wedding through to the crowded chaos of the multi-ethnic kitchen.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |