The week’s cinema releases, with Thierry Fiorile and Matteu Maestracci, with “The Story of Souleymane” by Boris Lojkine and “Niki” by Céline Sallette.
Published
Reading time: 7 min
Souleymane spins and zigzags on his bike, as best he can and as fast as possible, through the streets of Paris, constantly under pressure by the schedules and ratings of the delivery service for which he pedals.
Barely considered by clients, he takes advantage of his rare downtime to learn by heart, in good French, the invented story, which is passed from candidate to candidate, supposed to allow the granting of a residence permit. To make matters worse, his girlfriend who remained in Guinea tells him that she is going to marry someone else, and he owes money to this acquaintance, who provided him with the elements of this speech to swallow.
Especially since Abou Sangare, Souleymane’s interpreter – Jury Prize and Male Actor Prize in Cannes in the “Un Certain Regard” category for his interpretation – is himself awaiting authorization to stay on French soil, despite this story, and several jobs.
The film is nervous, suffocating, it grips the guts, we suffocate, we are literally in the wheels of Souleymane, but beyond his case, Boris Lojkine also documents a society which is dehumanizing, which is moving too fast, in which sometimes people are like pawns, boxes, services that must be validated or canceled.
Abou Sangare is majestic in his charisma, Nina Meurisse who we see ten minutes at the end, remarkable too, and truly The Story of Souleymane is a great film.
Niki by Céline Sallette
Painter, sculptor, visual artist, Niki de Saint Phalle, who died in 2002, was one of the figures of the New Realists movement in the early 1960s, with Yves Klein, Arman and Jean Tinguely who was her companion.
Céline Sallette – thanks be to her – spares us one more biopic, she focuses on the birth of Niki as an artist, or rather her rebirth. Victim of paternal incest, passed through the psychiatric hospital, she has the intuition that art, in particular by manipulating matter, will be her savior.
Charlotte Le Bon, herself a visual artist, perfectly embodies this moment when Niki de Saint Phalle escapes from madness. Of her, you undoubtedly know the Stravinsky fountain, at Beaubourg in Paris, or the shootings, performances during which she fired a rifle at her works, to reveal colors contained in pockets. Céline Sallette evokes the symbolic significance of these shots, and the creative constraint of not having had the right to show the works on screen.
So here is a successful anti-biopic: by choice, only mentioning the emergence of Niki de Saint Phalle, by constraint, not being able to show the works. Leaving the cinema, and wanting to get to know an artist better: mission accomplished.