‘L’Histoire de Souleymane’

The​ title seems a little tame if you haven’t seen the movie. L’Histoire de Souleymane: Souleymane’s Story (or History). For once the problem or the fun has nothing to do with the double meaning of the French word histoire. It just feels as if the director of the film, Boris Lojkine, and his co-writer, Delphine Agut, could have worked a bit harder. Or worked less. There’s a reason Mrs Dalloway isn’t called ‘Mrs Dalloway’s Story’.

We learn how wrong we are quite early in the narrative. In this film, a story is the answer you give to questions about where you come from or how you got here. ‘Here’ means Paris: its streets, by day and by night, and the offices of OFPRA, the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons. The film opens with a queue outside this office, then moves inside to the waiting room. We hear names being called and follow a young man named Souleymane Sangaré (superbly played, in his first acting role, by Abou Sangaré) down a series of corridors behind his interviewer, who remains unnamed but is wonderfully portrayed by Nina Meurisse.

The film’s story in another sense – its narrative and pictorial line – shows Souleymane riding his bike, picking up and delivering food orders, meeting friendly customers and quarrelling with the other kind. He comes from Guinea and has been in Paris for some time. After long days, he sleeps in a crowded hostel for émigrés on the outskirts of the city, beyond the Jaurès Métro – a bus and a train ride away from where he works. The narrative suspense centres on (and returns us to) our first sense of ‘story’: Souleymane’s interview at OFPRA, where we have already seen him arrive, is scheduled for the day after tomorrow. The outcome will determine whether he can stay in France.

Souleymane repeatedly runs into money troubles – not just his own, but also those of the people meant to pay him. When he is not delivering pizzas and other devourables, he is racing through the Paris suburbs in search of cash and the fake documents he needs for his interview. He tracks a friend down to his apartment, and they have a row in the doorway which ends with the friend flinging Souleymane down a flight of stairs. The fall leaves a wound on his face and causes his hand to bleed.

Over the course of the film, he talks to his mother on the phone and has two conversations with his girlfriend, Kadiatou (Keita Diallo). Speaking to Kadiatou, he attempts some jokes but can’t hide his melancholy. He is trying to say goodbye for ever without making it a big deal and is totally unpersuasive in encouraging her to marry a man who has just proposed to her. She has given him the news of this development in the hope of a quite different response from him. Of his mother he just wants to know she is ‘all right’, but we learn in another context that she has been ostracised by her community and her husband because of mental illness. This makes sad sense of her response to Souleymane on the phone: ‘There’s a lot of yelling in my head.’

Another kind of suspense – more like a suspension – arises from the fact that in this world telling or believing in the truth is a terrible tactical error. Souleymane gets tired on the job and is hit by a car because he fails to pay attention to a traffic light. But he wouldn’t be able to do any of this if he wasn’t using a friend’s work permit. One of his deliveries is to a group of policemen in a car. They pick up on a fault in his modes of identification and seem about to arrest him. It turns out they are just joking around.

The most unsettling example of suspended disbelief occurs when we encounter Barry (Alpha Oumar Sow), who not only supplies the documents that allow immigrants to request an interview, but also coaches them for it. A significant part of the film shows Souleymane rehearsing his story as he rides his bike. It needs a lot of rehearsing because he is supposed to be remembering the ‘good’ history – the one Barry has supplied for him – rather than his real one. When we first see Barry’s ‘school’, a young woman is recounting the harrowing story of her rape. She is subdued, hesitant and entirely convincing. This may be because she is telling the truth, but everything in the context suggests that her acting – unlike Souleymane’s – is perfect. The implication is that the truth needs to be formed, just as much as untruths do.

Souleymane is next in line for a practice run. When Barry rebukes him for not knowing his story, he asks for a new one. He struggles with the political details in the script. Barry will not oblige. His usual tactic for Guinean applicants is to claim ties to the UFDG (the Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea). But telling the same story as others can have bad consequences. Souleymane’s friend at the hostel has recently been turned down by OFPRA. The questioners informed him that too many applicants had told the same story, and that he failed the test when he couldn’t describe in detail the interior of a prison where he claimed to have been held.

The end of the movie takes us back to the beginning, actually repeating a few frames. Souleymane’s name is called in the waiting room; he follows the OFPRA interviewer to her office, and they have a long conversation. He is nervous, uncertain, embarrassed, but gets his story out. The interviewer is serious and sympathetic, typing up responses to what he says, making his answers easier for him. She has none of the impatience or weariness we often associate with bureaucrats.

I run into a curious spoiler concern at this point. Curious because the concern is not really about a spoiler. The film offers no resolution to any of the questions it raises about Souleymane’s future, the efficacy of truth or anything else. But Lojkine’s delicate play with our expectations is so finely handled that it’s best experienced directly rather than described. I will say that when Souleymane finishes telling his tale to the interviewer, she responds with a question: ‘Who wrote this story for you?’