Film review

  • Souleymane’s Story

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’histoire de Souleymane

    Boris Lojkine (2024)

    This drama’s many merits include a simple but clever title.  Boris Lojkine, who wrote the screenplay with Delphine Agut, tells the story of Souleymane Sangaré, a young Guinean immigrant seeking asylum in present-day France.  Souleymane’s story is also the piece of fiction he’s preparing for his imminent interview with OFPRA (France’s Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons) in Paris.  Souleymane’s Story begins in the OFPRA building, before moving into an extended flashback of the previous forty-eight hours in Souleymane’s life.  Lojkine then returns to his starting point, which leads into the climactic interview.

    The film’s structure calls to mind Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Two Days, One Night (2014) and Lojkine’s themes have echoes of both that film and the Dardennes’ Tori and Lokita (2022).  In Two Days, One Night, Marion Cotillard played a woman set to lose her job unless she managed, over the course of a weekend, to persuade enough of her co-workers to sign a petition in her support.  Souleymane (Abou Sangaré) has two days in which to finish learning his OFPRA script; pay Barry (Alpha Oumar Sow), the social worker who’s coaching him, in exchange for documents to present at the interview; and, in order to do that, obtain money that he’s owed by Emmanuel (Emmanuel Yovanie), a Cameroonian migrant from whom Souleymane rents a verified phone app account, in order to work as a food delivery courier – as an undocumented asylum seeker, Souleymane isn’t legally allowed to work.  In Tori and Lokita, whose title characters are two African child migrants in Belgium, Lokita is expected to earn money to send back to her family in Cameroon.  Souleymane has been trying to fund his unwell mother’s medication in Guinea-Conakry.

    The two Dardenne films mentioned are set, like all the brothers’ work, in the bleakly post-industrial, economically depressed area of Seraing, near Liège – which makes for a third, and a surprising, connection with Souleymane’s Story:  Paris on the cinema screen can seldom have looked less glamorous than it does here.  Yet Boris Lojkine doesn’t overstress the grimness – his film travels too quickly for that.  The tempo is dictated entirely by Souleymane, who’s usually urgently on the move.  Lojkine’s cinematographer, Tristan Galand, follows Souleymane as he rides his bicycle from one job to the next:  we see the Paris streets and roads ahead that the protagonist sees.  Whenever the phone app demands an up-to-date selfie to verify a courier’s identity, Souleymane must find Emmanuel immediately.  Once he’s finished work, very late in the evening, he runs for a Metro connection, then for a transit bus to the hostel where he’s booked a place for the night.  It’s a different hostel on each of the two nights in question:  on the second night, he misses the bus and spends the night in the stairwell of a nearby building.

    Plenty of words are also delivered at speed.  Travelling on his bike, Souleymane recites aloud details – dates, street names – in the invented story he’s trying to memorise for OFPRA about his political activism in Guinea.  Between jobs, he may chat hurriedly with his genial compatriot Khalil (Younoussa Diallo) or with the Ivorian migrants they both know.  Hectic, angry words are sometimes exchanged around the pick-up or drop-off of food deliveries.  Putting Souleymane through his paces, exasperated, impatient Barry barks out rapid-fire instructions.  At least until Souleymane’s asylum interview, the verbal tempo slows only in his occasional phone conversations with his nearest and dearest in Guinea – first with his mother, then twice with his girlfriend Kadiatou (Keita Dallo), who has received a marriage proposal from another man.  The second of these, a FaceTime call, happens when Souleymane is sitting in the stairwell, already near the end of his tether.  It’s a tender, poignant scene of mutually regretful farewell.

    Plenty also goes wrong for Souleymane in the run-up to the interview.  Late on the first evening, he collides with a car and comes off his bike.  His next delivery is rejected by a customer because the bag has been damaged in the collision.  His last delivery of the night is to a couple of uniformed police officers on duty:  they accuse Souleymane of working illegally but are hungry enough not to take the matter further.  The following night, after trying for hours to track down Emmanuel for the cash that he’s due, they finally confront each other in Emmanuel’s apartment block.  Emmanuel has been temporarily locked out of his courier account because of a customer complaint about Souleymane – this is Emmanuel’s pretext for withholding most of the money.  For good measure, he gets aggressive with Souleymane who, as a result, falls down some stairs and injures his face.

    It’s also worth noting two things that don’t go wrong.  Perhaps it’s only to be expected that Souleymane doesn’t get his bike nicked; if he did, the shadow of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) would loom too large in Souleymane’s Story.  More remarkably, Souleymane’s mobile never dies.  You can understand Lojkine taking the view that, if it did, his narrative might lose valuable momentum; even so, keeping the phone charged seems close to a miracle in Souleymane’s fraught circumstances.  Worth noting too that none of the sans-papiers is sans mobile phone, though Lojkine does well to illustrate other gradations in the asylum seekers’ food chain – Khalil, for example, hasn’t got himself a bike, let alone a courier account.

    This is a story in a hurry (the film runs only ninety-four minutes) yet Lojkine’s description of the cultural context doesn’t feel skimped.  Souleymane and Kadiatou are Muslim; this prompts repeated invocations of Allah in the FaceTime, but Souleymane isn’t evidently a practising Muslim.  The scenario is racially nuanced, too.  Souleymane is as likely to encounter a friendly white person (an elderly man in a seventh-floor apartment) as an unfriendly one (a notably unpleasant restaurant manager – a cameo from Lokhine himself).  The disputes between Africans may be good-humoured or dismaying:  a jokey argument about the Guinea and Ivory Coast national soccer teams on the one hand, Emmanuel’s treatment of Souleymane on the other.  The hero is also on the receiving ends of small acts of kindness, even though small is the operative word.  A worker in a Chinese eatery where he picks up a delivery, offers Souleymane a sweet, checking first that he likes strawberry flavour.  Street volunteers serving free tea or coffee to those who need it, are concerned to know if Souleymane has seen a doctor about his face wound.  (He hasn’t, needless to say.)

    There’s no privacy at Barry’s workplace:  one asylum applicant can easily hear another’s story as Barry rehearses his clients.  The woman whose turn it is before Souleymane’s tells of forced marriage and sexual abuse.  We don’t know whether her story is true; we do know that Souleymane’s bogus account of his political activities and imprisonment for these entails a more demanding memory test, about the exact locations of street demonstrations and the internal structures of the Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea (UFDG), a political group of which Souleymane had barely heard before Barry briefed him (his documents for OFPRA will include a fake UFDG membership card).  Souleymane admits to Barry that he’s just not a political animal.

    By the time he’s called in by a member of OFPRA staff (Nina Meurisse), we know Souleymane’s script nearly as well as he does:  as the interview proceeds, you may find yourself joining in, inside your head, with the lines he’s speaking.  You want his story to work – even though you know it’s fabricated and even though you know it won’t work.  His interviewer eventually tells him that she’s already heard exactly the story he’s telling from two other asylum seekers in recent days.  She urges him to tell the truth, at which point Souleymane gets upset, and (we can safely assume) does just that.  His mother has been mentally ill for most of her adult life and, for just as long, stigmatised as ‘a devil woman’.  Souleymane wants to earn enough money in France to pay for her psychiatric treatment and long-term care.  The OFPRA agent explains that the outcome of his application will be communicated in writing, that if unsuccessful Souleymane will have the right to appeal within a specified time.  In the film’s closing shots, he simply stands in the street outside the OFPRA offices.

    It’s the right ending, of course:  a realist accepts that anything more hopeful would be phony.  Yet you root so strongly for Souleymane that you want more for him than this.  It’s fortunate that – as you may have suspected from the shared surname of the protagonist and the young man playing him – there’s an overlap between Souleymane Sangaré’s life story and Abou Sangaré’s.  The latter was working as a car and truck mechanic in Amiens and had no prior acting experience when he won the part of Souleymane in Boris Lojkine’s open casting call.  At the time, Sangaré, whose mother in Guinea suffers from epilepsy, had made three unsuccessful applications for asylum in France; a deportation order was pending.  In January 2025, he was granted an official residence permit, valid for one year.  By then, he had won an acting prize at Cannes, where Souleymane’s Story premiered in Un Certain Regard the previous May, and been named Best Actor in the European Film Awards.

    A few weeks after his permit came through, he added the César for ‘Best Male Revelation’ to his awards tally.  That was one of four Césars won by Souleymane’s Story – along with Supporting Actress (Nina Meurisse), Original Screenplay and Film Editing (Xavier Sirven) – and all were well deserved.  Nina Meurisse is admirable as the interviewer.  The woman seems to be going through the motions at first but turns out to be more sympathetic than expected – yet truthfully so:  whatever the extent of her sympathy, she knows to maintain a professional impartiality and distance.

    Abou Sangaré is outstanding.  I would usually have reservations about the depth of talent and acting potential of a first-time performer who is, at least to some extent, playing himself.  But this young man – born in 2001 (so two years younger than his character) – is quite something.  He’s in every single scene of the film and never strikes a false note, however close the camera’s scrutiny.  His Souleymane is much more than a victim of circumstance – intensely likeable, radiating sympathy so naturally when he asks the old man on the seventh floor if he needs help cutting his pizza.  Sangaré is equally good at rueful irony, in Souleymane’s comments about his love rival in the FaceTime with Kadiatou.  According to an article that appeared in Le Monde in March 2026, he’s still working as a mechanic in Amiens and hasn’t yet been granted permanent residency in France.  Here’s hoping that this soon comes through and, with due respect to his day job (respect that Sangaré clearly has, from what he tells Le Monde), that his future career is in screen acting.  The César that he won was not only merited but also in just the right category.  Abou Sangaré truly is a revelation.

    9 June 2026

     

     

     

     

  • Ninotchka

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ernst Lubitsch (1939)

    Ninotchka is uneven and can be uncomfortable, but one terrific part lasts long enough to transcend the film’s defects and banish a viewer’s doubts.  Made just before the start of World War II in Europe, Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic comedy reached American cinemas a few weeks after war broke out, with a premiere in early October 1939 and general release the following month – hence the hasty addition of roguish explanatory text on screen before the action gets underway:  ‘This picture takes place in Paris in those wonderful days when a siren was a brunette… and if a Frenchman turned out the light, it was not on account of an air raid!’

    Buljanoff (Felix Bressart), Iranoff (Sig Ruman), and Kopalski (Alexander Granach), representatives of the Soviet Board of Trade, arrive in the French capital to sell jewels confiscated from their aristocratic owner by the Bolshevik government, following the 1917 Revolution.  The trio urgently debates the pros and cons of staying in the luxury Hotel Clarence’s ‘royal suite’; winning this fight with political conscience, they settle in there.  Alexis Rakonin (Gregory Gaye), a White Russian with a menial job at the hotel, eavesdrops on the visitors’ conversation about their mission in the city.  Count Rakonin, as he once was, immediately informs a fellow White Russian, the Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire), that her family jewels have come to Paris.  Swana hasn’t been reduced to working for a living and is keen to maintain her privileged lifestyle.  Her current lover, French aristocrat Count Léon d’Algout (Melvyn Douglas), comes to the royal suite to inform the Russian envoys and Mercier (Edwin Maxwell), the Parisian jeweller to whom they’re planning to sell, that a petition has been filed to prevent the jewels going anywhere.  The count’s even more effective tactic is to get Buljanoff, Iranoff and Kopalski drunk over a long and lavish lunch; he then sends a telegram on their behalf to Razinin, the envoys’ boss in Moscow, proposing a compromise re the jewels.  In angry response, Razinin dispatches a special envoy to Paris to sort things out – Nina Ivanovna ‘Ninotchka’ Yakushova (Greta Garbo).  Ninotchka is ruthlessly efficient, unyielding and, most conspicuously, unsmiling.  Until she meets Léon d’Algout, and they fall in love.

    Buljanoff, Iranoff and Kopalski assume their senior colleague, coming to Paris by train, will be a man.  They’ve no idea what he looks like and buzz around a busy station platform trying to pick him out.  ‘He looks like a comrade!’, decides Buljanoff, until the man in question gives a Nazi salute to the person he’s meeting.  If that provokes a sharp intake of breath – though it’s nothing compared with To Be or Not to Be, which Lubitsch made three years later – Ninotchka‘s comedy treatment of the Soviet system makes for more protracted unease.  It’s one thing doing jokes about five-year plans and dowdy outfits, another getting laughs from the envoys’ fears of exile to Siberia (never mind that happened in Tsarist Russia as well as during the communist era).  You sometimes laugh despite yourself, as when Ninotchka and Léon return to her hotel suite and indulge in a firing squad pantomime.  Both are already intoxicated, champagne virgin Ninotchka especially so; tying a napkin over her face, Léon opens another bottle of champagne, and she slumps to the ground when the cork pops.  The scene is redeemed by a lovely grace note – before he opens the bottle, Léon pauses and briefly lifts Ninotchka’s blindfold to kiss her.

    Plenty of contributors, on both sides of the camera, had emigrated from Europe to the US.  Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch, who wrote the screenplay with American-born Charles Brackett, were Jewish escapees from Nazi Germany – ditto Felix Bressart and Alexander Granach.  The latter’s escape route was via the Soviet Union; whereas Gregory Gaye really was a White Russian.  Others, like Lubitsch himself and Melchior Lyengel (who receives the story credit), though Jewish, came to Hollywood before the Nazi era, while Bela Lugosi (who eventually appears as Razinin) and Sig Ruman – not to mention Garbo herself – had Christian upbringings in Europe.  Despite this intriguing mix of backgrounds, Ninotchka is smug about the nonsense of communism and the superiority of capitalism.  (It’s striking to reflect that the Great Depression was barely over and that, within a few years, Hollywood would be Red Scare-riven.)  With Léon, Swana and minor French characters played by born-and-bred Americans, there’s also a persistent whiff of Hollywood cultural imperialism in the air.

    None of this stops Ninotchka from being enjoyable.  At first, the comedy is more pleasingly accomplished than laugh out loud:  the envoys’ arrival at the swanky hotel; debonair Léon’s opening scene with vain, self-centred Swana; the Russians’ lunch with Léon.  (It takes place behind closed doors; the comings-and-goings of short-skirted waitresses and the sounds of increasing merriment from inside the royal suite signal the fun being had.)  These preparatory scenes last a bit too long and it’s a relief when Ninotchka arrives on the scene.  From the point at which she and Léon first meet on a Paris street – each unaware of who the other is – the film takes off.  Nothing has prepared you for the sheer delight of the first evening that the formidably logical apparatchik and the affably hedonistic aristo spend together, at the Eiffel Tower, then at his apartment.  She relentlessly disparages his moribund culture and takes to pieces silly ideas of romantic love.  A self-described ‘tiny cog in the great wheel of evolution’, Ninotchka succeeds only in enchanting her companion – ‘You’re the most adorable cog I ever saw in my life’.  For her part, though insisting that love is just ‘a biological, or shall we say chemical, process’, she concedes that ‘chemically, we are already quite sympathetic’ and even goes so far as to tell Léon that ‘his general appearance is not distasteful’.  Then, shortly after midnight, he takes a telephone call from Buljanoff.  Léon and Ninotchka realise who they’ve been with for the past few hours.  Despite his protests, she brusquely leaves his apartment, to get back to the job in hand.

    Greta Garbo is splendid – really funny – as the poker-faced Ninotchka, and Melvyn Douglas a perfect comic partner.  The impetus is sustained all the way through to lunchtime the next day.  Not to be deterred, Léon follows Comrade Yakushova to a working-men’s bistro, pretending to be a regular there – not that Ninotchka is fooled.  He sits himself down at her table and tries to improve her mood by telling her jokes.  Her face doesn’t crack, even though one of the jokes is pretty good.  A group of men at a neighbouring table laugh loudly at it, but not as loudly as when Léon leans too far back in his chair, and crashes to the floor.  Ninotchka, too, finds this hilarious.  Garbo’s laughter, a legendary screen moment, is pivotal in the pair’s romance.  It’s also a turning point in Ninotchka in perhaps less intended ways.

    ‘Dying is easy, comedy is hard’ … it maybe follows from that well-known acting maxim that crying is easy, laughing is hard.  The immediate problem when ‘Garbo Laughs!’ is that you don’t believe her.  According to Pauline Kael, there’s ‘a widespread story that when the time came for her laughing scene [Garbo] pantomimed laughter beautifully, but no sound emerged; it was later provided by someone anonymous’.  Whatever the reason, the effect is oddly unnatural.  (Melvyn Douglas’s switch to mirth is, despite Léon’s spectacular loss of dignity, more convincing.  Léon is embarrassed and annoyed by Ninotchka’s reaction, before joining in the laughter with gusto.)  The turning point results in a longer-term problem, too.  When Ninotchka cracks up, Lubitsch clearly means the moment to express the ending of her resistance to Léon.  The trouble is, Greta Garbo is too ready to revert to what she usually did and was celebrated for – too eager to go into woman-in-love self-surrender mode.  On one level, this makes sense because the role here is so much about the star herself.  Ninotchka’s humour bypass corresponds to Garbo’s reputation as an unsurpassed screen tragedienne; there’s more than one reference in the Ninotchka script to wanting to be alone.  On another level, though, the film seems to deflate from this point on – and Garbo’s characterisation is made to seem lacking.

    Still, although Ninotchka never quite recovers the momentum of that earlier passage, there are lots of good bits to come, as the heroine thaws and is seduced by French champagne and couture, as well as charmed by Léon.   (Garbo’s wardrobe is, as usual, designed by Adrian.  It includes a memorably ridiculous ‘chic’ hat that Ninotchka first deplores, then sets her heart on and buys.  It’s a blessing when she takes it off.)  There’s a fine caustic exchange between the leading lady and Swana, who proves more anxious to get rid of Ninotchka than to get back her jewels, though she does the latter to achieve the former – and to get Léon back, too.  During the night, Rakonin swipes the jewels from Ninotchka’s hotel room, where Swana arrives next afternoon to propose to her champagne-hungover love rival another compromise:  Swana will hand the jewellery over provided that Ninotchka is on the next flight back to Moscow.  Ninotchka, after selling the jewels to Mercier, reluctantly does just that.

    Greta Garbo, a good actress who became a great movie star, is an icon partly because her screen career didn’t last long.  She made a good few Hollywood films (Ninotchka was the last but one) but over a period of only fifteen years:  because audiences didn’t see her age significantly, Garbo’s image is preserved in amber as well as celluloid.  Melvyn Douglas’s stage and screen career lasted more than half a century.  He never seemed to go out of fashion but was never a star.  Although he had plenty of lead roles, Douglas remained essentially a character actor – which shows to great advantage in Ninotchka.  He’s able to negotiate the character shifts dictated by the story more easily than Greta Garbo.  His Léon is funny and charming in his own right, but Douglas also knows his place:  he never tries to upstage Garbo.  When Ninotchka and Léon first arrive at his apartment, they’re welcomed by his elderly butler, Gaston (Richard Carle).  Ninotchka, observing that Gaston is ‘horribly old’ and ‘looks sad’ (he doesn’t), scolds Léon – ‘You should not make him work’ – and asks, ‘Do you whip him?’  Léon replies, ‘No, though the mere thought makes my mouth water’.  Melvyn Douglas’s beautifully straight delivery of that line epitomises the quality of his performance throughout.

    You can guess from her acting style that Ina Claire was renowned for her work on stage rather than screen, but her theatricality as Swana is good value.  A little of Buljanoff, Iranoff and Kopalski goes quite a long way:  Ernst Lubitsch does well to ration their screen time.  Once they and Ninotchka are back in the USSR, the film is marking time (and the jokey military parade celebrating Stalin is another episode that’s retrospectively hard to smile at).  But this is also partly testament to the success of the film’s central romance – you’re impatient for Léon to reappear and give Ninotchka and himself the ending they deserve and we want for them.  The three clueless envoys end up in Constantinople; Commissar Razinin dispatches Ninotchka there to rescue their latest trading failure.  On arrival, she discovers they’re now running their own restaurant, trading for personal profit rather than Mother Russia’s.  When Ninotchka demands to know who’s behind this disgraceful dereliction of duty, Léon returns to the screen.  Denied a visa to enter the Soviet Union, he decided to make alternative arrangements to see Ninotchka again, conspiring with the biddable Buljanoff, Iranoff and Kopalski to do so.  Léon asks her to stay with him and out of her homeland for good.  ‘When it is a choice between my personal interest and the good of my country, how can I waver?’ she replies, ‘No one shall say Ninotchka was a bad Russian’.  She then promptly joins Léon in a conclusive clinch.  It’s a nifty ending – the West has won, communism is vanquished, Ninotchka and Léon are a happy couple.  Which left this viewer happy, too.

    3 June 2026

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