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The title of French director and screenwriter Boris Lozhkin’s new film, The Souleymane Story, contains several interconnected meanings. In the most general sense, it describes the film itself: it’s the story of Souleymane (Abu Sangaré), an illegal immigrant from Guinea-Conakry living in Paris. He applies for asylum at the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA), which gives the title another meaning. Souleymane’s application requires an in-person interview, and he is going to tell a fictitious story about how he ended up abroad: that he had to flee Guinea after being arrested and imprisoned for his political activities. At the heart of this story is a man named Barry (Alfa Oumar Sow), who trains refugees like Souleymane to lie during interviews to gain sympathy and achieve dramatic effect, and provides them with forged documents to back up his lies.
In an early scene, as Suleiman rehearses his story, Barry chides him for his careless delivery (and frequent distortion) of the fictional facts he’s been given. “It should sound like your life,” he says. “Go into the details, because they matter.” Suleiman’s Story challenges the difference between a plausible story and an outright false one. Ultimately, Lozhkin’s film, co-written with Delfina Agut, is a carefully constructed work of fiction. It begins with mounting tension—Suleiman’s interview is due to take place in just two days—that in a formulaic but effective manner heightens an already tense personal circumstance. Much of the film’s power depends on its moment-to-moment conviction, a set of narrative and aesthetic choices that, presented in a series of quick, dynamically edited scenes, rarely feel like choices.
Details are key here, and Lozhkin uses them skillfully to immerse the viewer in his protagonist’s grueling daily life. Souleymane works as a delivery boy and spends much of his day biking around the city, picking up and delivering groceries. (Lozhkin and his cinematographer, Tristan Galan, filmed much of the footage chasing Sangaré on their bikes.) But Souleymane’s struggles go beyond the usual indignities of low pay and grueling hours. Unable to work legally, he uses the account of another delivery boy, Emmanuel (Emmanuel Yovani), who takes most of Souleymane’s modest income. On a typical day, Souleymane must travel several miles to take a selfie with Emmanuel, circumventing the platform’s built-in security. On a bad night, he might find himself in a verbal altercation with a restaurant owner who makes him wait a long time for his food. Or he could be knocked off his bike, ruining the delivery and further damaging his customer satisfaction rating, so important to Emmanuel. Even the smallest setback reinforces a vicious cycle of chaos and failure that is unlikely to end when Souleyman spends the night at a homeless shelter and finds himself struggling once again – not for a delivery, but for a bed and a shower.
The film deliberately avoids flashbacks to Souleymane’s life in Guinea; it does not pretend to give us more than a partial view of events. And these narrative gaps hint at the third, most elusive meaning of the title, which concerns Souleymane’s true story: the reality of his life up to this point, the people and places he left behind in search of a better life abroad. We get some brief evidence of these sacrifices, mostly through Souleymane’s phone calls home. He communicates with his girlfriend Kadiatu (Keita Diallo), who longs to be with him again, but her patience is tested by a marriage proposal from another man. Souleymane also tries to visit his ailing mother regularly, whose condition, we sense from the combination of anxiety and tenderness in his voice, plays a decisive role in his arrival in France.
As a vision of a life inexorably governed by the unholy confluence of smartphone apps and human appetites, and the inexorable constraints of subway routes and bus schedules, Suleiman’s Story may be the most nuanced portrait of the gig economy in action since Sorry We Missed You (2020), Ken Loach’s drama about the mounting misery of a middle-aged delivery driver. But Lozhkin’s film, for all its straightforward power, also contains fleeting moments of relief, delivered mostly with a wise lack of inflection or emphasis. There are the restaurant workers who, rather than shouting at Suleiman or pushing him away, offer him a smile, a coffee, a piece of candy. There is the frail elderly customer who gratefully accepts a pizza delivery, and whose need for physical assistance awakens Suleiman’s own compassion. Some police officers, noticing that Suleiman was using someone else's account to deliver food to them, even showed self-willed mercy: they began to tease and pester him.
Sourse: newyorker.com
