Samba

After the unprecedented success of ‘The Intouchables’ in 2011 which went on to become France’s second biggest grossing movie of all time, filmmaking duo Oliver Nakache and Eric Toledano reunite with their Cesar
Winning actor Omar Sy for a new drama/rom-com about un-documented immigration which is a very thorny topic especially in France.

Sy plays Samba Cissé a migrant from Senegal to France, who had been working as a dish washer in a hotel in Paris for the past 10 years and who is going through the legal process of becoming a resident. However after a bureaucratic slip-up he lands up in a detention center where he meets Alice a rather meek charity worker who tries to help him with fight his impending deportation. To no avail however, and Samba is given official notice to leave France in the very near future.

Meanwhile, he tries to make the best life possible without ‘papers’ picking up casual laboring work whenever he can.  He also complicates his situation when he goes to fulfill a promise to another inmate still in detention to visit his girlfriend on the outside, and ends up having a one-night stand with her instead. Samba feels the need to share this information with Alice, totally unaware that she has ignored the golden rule of the Legal Aid Office about keeping her distance, and is in fact carrying a torch for the handsome Senegalese. She does at least confide with Samba that she has ‘issues’ that she has been dealing with in her own life that caused her to ‘burn out’ from her high profile management job where she was a complete workaholic until she just ‘lost it’ one day and was sent to an Clinic to recover.

Samba’s life seems to teeter from one disaster to another in this entertaining melodramatic plot, which does get unnecessary a trifle long-winded and complicated at times. The action is given a comic twist by the presence of his friend Wilson, a Moroccan illegal immigrant who masquerades as a Brazilian as this gets him more action with women, but it could still comfortably lose 30 minutes off its 119-minute running time.

The success of the movie though is completely down to the magnetic performance of a rather wonderful Sy who shows once again what a truly dynamic actor he really is.  He’s aided and abetted by very understated Charlotte Gainsburg, in a role totally out of character for her, and giving one of the finest performances we have ever seen from her. They are far from an obvious pairing and the subtlety of their chemistry makes for one of the most unpredictable enjoyable aspects of the movie. So too is the fact that Toledano and Nakache at least avoided theobvious and just married the pair off to resolve Samba’s alien status

It’s definite a tough subject for a comedy in any culture, and the fact that they carry off so well is partly due to the fact that the filmmakers have avoided many of clichés/stereotypes and Samba is written as a compassionate and intelligent man with an un-dramatic history and very straightforward desires for his future that makes you want to will him to succeed.  Will he though?

This will by no means be the same runaway success of  ‘The Intouchables’  but Omar Sy’s performance alone will make it a must-see movie to still make this a big hit this summer.