Review: A ride through Paris – and life – with Souleymane
A beautifully humanising film takes us into the frantic, undocumented life of a delivery rider.
Line Sidonie Talla Mafotsing
A grey and underground economy has grown alongside the multibillion-euro food delivery industry in France. Registered couriers play the system by “renting” their verified accounts to those most desperate to make ends meet: typically undocumented migrants and asylum-seekers willing to work long hours for low pay under all weather conditions.
L’Histoire de Souleymane (Souleymane’s Story), is a dive into the hectic life of those invisible workers.
French director Boris Lojkine’s newest feature follows Souleymane Sangare, an undocumented Guinean immigrant played by first-time actor Abou Sangare, whose asylum hearing is imminent. Hectic is an understatement.
Scrambling for the money to pay his immigration broker, Souleymane can’t rest to prepare for the interview that could change the course of his life. He must make food deliveries. Each time the app asks for face-verification, he must chase after Emmanuel. Zipping through Paris, he practises the story he will tell at the interview: the broker said that his actual story would not suffice. Until Emmanuel ghosts him; and he learns the woman he loved in Guinea is marrying someone else.
Lojkine’s screenplay – co-written with Delphine Agut – is a realistic account of undocumented life in the big metropoles. Xavier Sirven’s editing delivers intensity and urgency, Tristan Galand’s cinematography allows the viewer to fully inhabit each situation and Lojkine’s choice to go without music allows the noise of the city to become the film’s score.
Sangare’s emotional performance explores Souleymane’s vulnerabilities and anxieties as if they were his own. Perhaps it helped that the actor himself had only recently been granted a six-month temporary visa in France after living undocumented since 2017. He knew those anxieties intimately.
This is a story about the choices one makes when all they know is survival.