Film Review
Intouchables
(2011) was always going to be a hard act to follow. The most
commercially successful French film to date (indeed the highest
grossing non-English language film so far), this was a rare example of
a mainstream French hit which went on to achieve massive
global success. They say that lightning never strikes twice in the
same spot and directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano prove just
that with their similar socially themed comedy follow-up to their
worldwide money-spinner.
Samba
may be just as worthy as
Intouchables,
in that it confronts head-on the most pressing social concern in France
today, namely immigration, but, lacking the courage of its convictions,
it fails to have the authenticity and crowd-pulling appeal of its
predecessor. It's an enjoyable, middle-of-the-road comedy-drama
that makes some astute observations on France's immigration problems
but it struggles to find anything meaningful to say and has nothing
like the impact of 2011's box office winner.
Based on Delphine Coulin's 2011 novel
Samba
pour la France, Nakache and Toledano's latest social comedy sets
out to replicate the most successful ingredient of
Intouchables, an improbable
relationship between two individuals from very different worlds, by
partnering the star of that film, Omar Sy, with perennial favourite
Charlotte Gainsbourg. It's a bold, some would say wildly
eccentric, pairing and had a little more effort gone in to developing
Gainsbourg's character, it might conceivably have worked as well as the
magnificent Sy-François Cluzet double act in
Intouchables. The most
disappointing aspect of
Samba
is that Gainsbourg's character starts out as a vaguely sketched
caricature (a stressed out executive who turns to voluntary work as a
kind of therapy) and never really develops into a fully fledged human
being. By contrast, Sy's character is admirably drawn, and
convincingly played by one of French cinema's most charismatic new
talents. This imbalance becomes painfully apparent in the film's
second half as Nakache and Toledano struggle to develop a convincing
romantic rapport between Sy and Gainsbourg's characters. It is at
this point that the film begins to flounder and lose both its focus and
its sense of purpose. The lack of any real chemistry between the
leads also has the effect of dimming the emotional resonance of the
later sequences, which feel more saccharine than truthful.
The film may struggle to keep going much beyond its mid-point but it is
very effective in its first half, which offers some dark insights into
the way in which France treats its illegal immigrants. The latter
are basically an unseen, unwanted underclass, exploited by the
unscrupulous and living in constant fear of deportation - something
that carries strong echoes of life under Nazi occupation during
WWII. When the intensely likeable Samba is taken into custody he
finds himself in a Kafkaesque limbo existence that only the French,
with their love of soul-destroying, nit-picking bureaucracy, could
bring into being. Some well-judged comic interludes (some
featuring an excellent Tahar Rahim in a rare comedic role) punctuate
what is essentially a bleak narrative that puts in doubt France's claim
to be a civilised, forward-looking nation.
Concerns about race, immigration and integration have assumed paramount
importance in the French psyche over the past decade, leading to a
surge in xenophobia and political backlash that has benefited the
extreme rightwing parties such as the Front National. A more
overtly populist film,
Qu'est-ce qu'on a fait au Bon Dieu,
has made easy capital from these concerns and is likely to be the most
popular French film of 2014, having already stormed its way into the
top ten of the most successful French films to date. In their far
more considered and intelligent film, Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano
probe more deeply but still fail to come grips with the heart of the
matter, a crisis of national identity combined with a lack of
willingness to face up to the realities of mass migration in the 21st
century.
Samba gives a human face to
the 'invisible' hoards that are apparently swarming across our borders,
and in doing so it helps to increase our awareness of how ugly western
society is becoming (France is by no means the only country with an
immigration problem), but it only scratches the surface of a complex
and profoundly worrying phenomenon. In their defence, Nakache and
Toledano would argue that their remit is to entertain, not lecture, and
in this at least they are successful.
Samba is an amiable (albeit
somewhat uneven and overlong) crowdpleaser, hilariously funny in
places, but the fact remains that it could have been so much
more. What is reveals is only the minutest tip of a terrifyingly
large iceberg.
© James Travers 2014
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