There’s a turnaround in the climax of this noctambulist Paris immigrant drama that suddenly charges the film’s seemingly neutral title with meaning. Food courier protagonist, Souleymane, is hopefully in the process of altering his destiny, and this key scene is carried by fantastic acting from Abou Sangaré: trembling violently as a lifetime’s tension and struggle, as well as the daily grind of an app wage slave, comes pouring out.
Souleymane is a kind of every-immigrant, clinging on at the margins of the French capital. Hailing from Guinea, he sublets the delivery app account of Cameroonian Emmanuel (Emmanuel Yovanie) in order to work. Under constant pressure to meet food delivery targets, he needs money in order to pay fellow Guinean Barry (Alpha Oumar Sow), who is coaching him how to pass his asylum interview the day after next. But the harassed Souleymane struggles to reproduce the details of the political repression story that Barry recommends he tell.
Riding shotgun with Souleymane as he crosses the Parisian boulevards, the film features some of the hairiest cycling scenes since Buster Keaton. Director Boris Lojkine shoots France’s ever-shifting capital with hazy impressionistic beauty, occasionally breaking out of shallow focus with a sobering crystalline composition to situate his protagonist in this capitalist warren. But Souleymane is the constant focal point and in a precarious position – not just traffic-wise, but also economically and emotionally. As he needily bugs the app’s call centre, then loses his rag with a restaurateur behind on his orders, the film watches these micro-humiliations steadily erode his soul.
In its intimate accompaniment of an immigrant trying to make ends meet, Lojkine’s film is reminiscent of Ramin Bahrani’s 2005 New York-set drama Man Push Cart – though it’s even less sentimental in the full swing of the digital age, often curtly ending scenes as if on the same tight schedule as Souleymane. But the issues are fundamentally the same: the enforced invisibility of a class of economic migrants who are now so numerous that many game the system, doubling their exploitation. Sangaré’s exemplary, unfeigned performance helps them speak.
