SYNOPSIS
As he pedals through the streets of Paris to deliver meals, Souleymane repeats his story. In two days, he has to go through his asylum application interview, the key to obtaining papers. But Souleymane is not ready.

"After Hope, the film he made in 2014 about two migrants from Cameroon and Nigeria trying to reach Europe, French director Boris Lojkine was often asked to tell the other part of the story, its continuation, i.e. what awaits them upon their arrival in France. He was a little reluctant, he says, at the idea of filming in Paris (indeed, his previous fiction films and documentaries took him far away, in Vietnam or in Africa), but Lojkine started scouting for locations in the French capital, focusing on young, underage migrants. And then the 2020 Covid lockdown came, and all of a sudden, the streets of Paris became empty: “the only people one could see were those doing deliveries,” Lojkine remembers (lebleudumiroir.fr: les seules personnes qu’on voyait, c’était les livreurs). This is when the director realized that he wanted to show how “migration flows” and “digital capitalism” meet (la rencontre entre ces deux sujets m’intéressait: le flux migratoire et la description d’un capitalisme numérique). Abou Sangare, the actor who plays the main character, was actually an undocumented migrant when casting and shooting began (since then, after having been denied regularization three times, he finally obtained, this January, a permit for one year). The story told by the film echoes Abou Sangare’s own story in many ways, even though he arrived in France as a minor, at the age of 16, and in real life he works as a mechanic who repairs trucks. In the film, Souleymane’s tools, instead, are his mobile phone and his bike. And one of the most powerful aspects of the film is that both the phone and the bike become fully cinematic. As Lojkine explains in the interview I mentioned: “the relationship with the telephone somehow composes his solitude in the city” (le rapport de l’homme au téléphone compose quelque chose de sa solitude dans la ville). And the director adds: “The phone is also a source of light. We wanted to show his face lit only by the phone, to reinforce the feeling that he’s in a little bubble, a little blue bubble.” (Le téléphone est aussi une source de lumière. On a voulu montrer son visage éclairé seulement par l’appareil, ça renforce le sentiment qu’il est dans une petite bulle, une petite bulle bleue.) As for the bike, it is obviously the main vehicle not only of the character’s movements through the city but also of our gaze. In many scenes the bicycle was both the represented object and the very vector of representation, Lojkine explains in another interview (cinebulletin.ch):
“We made several trials to achieve an immersive feeling, a sense of danger and a sense of speed. It became clear to us that the bike had to be filmed from other bikes. So the whole technical crew was on bikes around the actor.” (On a fait plusieurs essais techniques pour obtenir à la fois un sentiment immersif, un sentiment de danger et un sentiment de rapidité. Il s’est imposé à nous que le vélo devait être filmé à partir d’autres vélos. Toute l’équipe technique était donc sur des vélos autour du comédien.) Allow me just one last word about the plot. Not the content of the plot (I wouldn’t want to spoil it to you), but the plot seen as a line, as a movement. In one of his most interesting comments on the film (lebleudumiroir.fr), Lojkine says that “the scenario has two lines, the asylum line and the delivery line” (le scénario comporte deux lignes, celle de l’asile et celle de la livraison), as if the application for asylum and the trajectories through Paris on the bicycle were somehow parallel but also diverging. Watching the film, I had the constant impression that what moved me, the motion that created so much emotion, was this secret correspondence between the crisscrossing, zigzagging lines of the deliveries through the streets of Paris and the accidents in the storyline of a whole life that depends on not taking the wrong narrative road."

Peter Szendy
(Comparative Literature & Cogut Institute for Humanities, Brown University)