Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with co-writer/director Boris Lojkine and lead Abou Sangaré who won a best performance award at Cannes in 2024 and a César in 2025. Delphine Agut was the other co-writer.
Illicit gig working in France by asylum seekers from Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire (I think). This involves figuring out the protocols of the homeless shelters, acquiring a fake account on a delivery platform (at a cost of about 50% of the income), a bicycle and running red lights in Paris in the cold and wet. Sangaré has some well-constructed interactions with a variety of people, humanising the French, and only a very few nasty ones that were not especially racist; it was as if everyone accepted the present moment's need for an underclass, even the gendarmerie. He clearly worked hard, especially in a concluding scene that he totally nailed with some able help from Nina Meurisse (who also won a César for her efforts). It put me in mind of that excellent two-hander interview in Adolescence (2025). This one is not violent but achieves a similar level of emotional charge. She does not ask him about the damage to his face.
The story itself doesn't have many places to go, being a tale of living at the limits of precarity while waiting for the one big event that might change things. (I was glad his bike and phone somehow did not run out of charge or get stolen.) It felt less overtly political than Welcome (2009). The lightly-drawn frenemy, family and horseplaying-buddy aspects evoked Io Capitano (2023). The cinematography is excellent.
A Critic's Pick by Natalia Winkelman: "not only build[s] empathy with its hero's pain but channels its sensation." The scene with the elderly Frenchman on the seventh floor was indeed well conceived. Michael Wood.
