Chad Chenouga and Roschdy Zem play with our nerves in college

Roschdy Zem is “The main”, Chad Chenouga’s latest feature film. And he is masterful in the skin of a man whose actions one wonders if they are motivated by love or ego. A certitude : Sabri Lahlali, deputy principal of a college awaiting promotion to the next level, is afraid that his world will crumble. Literally and figuratively, he runs to escape the failure embodied by his brother Saïd (Hedi Bouchenafa), handicapped by psychological disorders. Sabri also takes great care to keep his son, Naël (Jibril Bhira), away from his uncle, who is taking the patent in the establishment he co-directs.

His ex-companion Noémie (Marina Hands of the Comédie Française), from whom he is divorced and with whom he has shared custody of the teenager, is also a teacher in the college in this district where Sabri grew up and did everything to s to extract bars from buildings. Because his origins and the prejudices associated with them obsess him: a character trait that shines through when he speaks, for example, to a recalcitrant teenager whom he wants to save from herself. In this college, which has become a microcosm, tAll his family is thus reunited in a tense atmosphere, to say the least. The organization of the patent test, for which he finds that Naël has not prepared enough, will suck Sabri. Far beyond what he would have imagined.

A man in panic

Between the rigidity of the character, which is moreover reproached to him by his entourage and his colleagues, and the unbridled quest for success to which the educator aspires for his offspring, Chad Chenouga sets up the ideal framework to organize the inexorable fall of his hero. The main is based on a true story. That of a man who already had everything to succeed and who, it seems, was a little too greedy. If the stakes of the film are known from the first minutes, it is the way in which the noose tightens on Sabri which is wonderfully constructed and described by the director. The sequence of events and Roschdy Zem’s game of economy carry a tension that never loses intensity, even if the development of the plot might allow it. Like Sabri, entangled in his principles and convictions, the spectator always has a lump in his stomach. Especially since Roschdy Zem succeeds in making this closed character an open book for the viewer. The actor, whose acting is exceptional, makes this individual, full of contradictions, very present despite everything for his brother and anxious to win back his wife, a very endearing being.

In the same vein, the man’s ambiguous relationship with his soon-to-retire supervisor, Estelle (Yolande Moreau), appears as a window into Sabri’s psyche. By sharing their latest literary discoveries, they discover each other a little. “I invented a Sabri that does not exist”, she will throw at him, when he is certainly the most fragile. He would have nothing of the romantic character she had imagined. Sabri would ultimately be, like everyone else, very human. The main is a sublime incursion into this wavering humanity.

The sheet

Gender : drama
Director: Chad Chenouga
Actors: Roschdy Zem, Yolande Moreau and Marina Hands from the Comédie Française, Hedi Bouchenafa and Jibril Bhira
Country : France
Duration : 1h22
Exit : May 10, 2023
Distributer : The pact