What Is Realism Today? On Souleymane’s Story

Still from Souleymane’s Story, dir. Boris Lojkine, 2024

Immigration officers are good listeners. The climactic scene of Boris Lojkine’s Souleymane’s Story (L’Histoire de Souleymane, 2024) is predicated on this fact. In this scene we see the titular young Guinean protagonist, played by real-life former sans papiers Abou Sangaré, being given his long-awaited chance to gain the right to live and work legally in France. Whether he will receive the protection of the French state depends entirely on whether a young, seemingly friendly, but increasingly incredulous bureaucrat believes what Souleymane tells her. He’s exhausted. For the last ninety minutes, we have watched as Souleymane is forced to mobilize every minute of his time either working for a Deliveroo account which he “rents” via a hyper-exploitative arrangement, or practicing the story that he has paid to have prepared for him. In his brief moments of respite, Souleymane takes a shuttle bus back and forth from a homeless shelter on the outskirts of Paris where he sleeps, and in which he must book a place every morning at the crack of dawn. Nonetheless, in this climactic scene he is initially collected and calm. He begins to recite a fabricated narrative of political repression and imprisonment, while the interviewer taps away on her keyboard, occasionally asking for clarifications which, while not directly contradicting what is being said, are intended to reveal and intensify inconsistencies. The game is up after about five minutes, and the woman loses her patience. She tells Souleymane he has been conned, that she has heard this story several times this week, and that he has one chance to try to save his asylum appeal: be honest. After a few seconds Souleymane relents and decides to tell his real story. The eyes, ears, and recording devices of the French state become in this moment a platform via which Souleymane gathers his fragmented and exhausted self into a coherent history. The telling of his story is loaded with a catharsis and a relief inherent in those ephemeral moments in which, after a period of stifled expression, one can be properly true to one’s experience.

Recognition by another person is a condition of self-certainty, and the immigration worker listens with what appears to be overwhelming sympathy as Souleymane tells of a fear that his apparently schizoaffective mother would be victimized due to superstitions about witchcraft in his home country. He explains how this led him to make the extraordinarily dangerous journey to France via Libya—where he was tortured—and Italy, all with the aim of earning enough to be able to provide his mother with some degree of security. The sympathy offered here is an evidently anguished one: the officer knows that this story positions the speaker firmly as an economic migrant and not a political refugee. Once the story is finished, Souleymane is informed that he will receive the results of his claim by post and that if it is denied he will have up to one month to launch an appeal. The film ends as the young man steps out of the immigration office, with the winter sun of Paris illuminating his face in an instant of genuine pathos. His fate is not made explicit, but it is surely decided: no confession of economic motivations will allow him to gain asylum, and Souleymane’s already desperate life is going to get worse. We are left with an overwhelming sense of injustice alongside an authentically cathartic sense of how love for one’s family can lead people to acts of extraordinary courage and sacrifice.

This sequence works to bring the film to an aesthetically coherent conclusion. Souleymane is damned; the best he can hope for is that he will remain on the outskirts of the economy as a hyper-exploited illegal worker. Nonetheless, he has told his story, and he possesses a more profound sense of himself for having done so. There is, I would suggest, a perverse irony in the fact that the one who grants the recognition necessary for this sense of self to hold is a representative of the same state which condemns Souleymane and others in his position to insoluble precarity. In short, we are left with an irreducible sense that while the French state won’t help him, it has provided Souleymane with the recognition necessary to fully express himself, a recognition he receives nowhere else in the film. The catharsis which emerges from this self-expression covers over actual political critique.

As a representation of the life of an illegalized worker in contemporary Paris, Souleymane’s Story is deeply engaging. It is tense and well-acted, and the scenes in which Souleymane dashes around Paris’s 18th and 19th arrondissements on his bike are thrilling. Lojkine makes palpable the danger and creeping dread that permeates a life lived under these conditions; his use of frequent jump cuts generates a visceral sense of the speed and dexterity required to satisfy the app. An inevitable car accident midway through works as a highly effective jump scare, and in another scene Lojkine shoots a van containing cops who will taunt Souleymane with arrest and deportation as a monster that emerges sickeningly from the camera’s depth of field. Above all, the film contains important insights regarding how illegalized work makes possible state-sanctioned modes of labor. At one point, Souleymane even becomes something close to a care worker when he delivers a pizza to an elderly man with Parkinson’s disease. The man is friendly and engaging and Souleymane helps him to his dinner table, while he talks to the man’s adult son on the phone to obtain the code necessary to sign off on the order and get back out to work. Take Souleymane away and this man has no food, his son has extra duties, and the capacity of the latter to function in whatever white-collar domain we assume he works in diminishes significantly. Illegalized work makes the economy possible, and Lojkine knows how to illustrate this quickly and with impact. On a cinematic level, the scene works according to a palpable tension between tenderness and necessity, as a real moment of recognition between the elderly Parisian and the young Guinean is mediated by the latter’s urgent need to get back on the street. 

This is all to the film’s credit, but thinking about it afterwards, I could not shake the problem of its climax. As I watched the scene, I was reminded of the end of Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022). Diop, a filmmaker of Senegalese heritage who has produced important documentaries on the life of immigrant communities in the Parisian suburbs, focused her debut feature on two female characters. The first of these is a university lecturer called Rama who was born in France to a Senegalese mother. Rama hears of the murder of a fifteen-month-old baby by Laurence Coly, the infant’s mother and a Senegalese immigrant. Rama travels to Laurence’s trial in the titular coastal town to observe the court proceedings. The climax of the film involves an impassioned speech from Laurence’s defense lawyer. She speaks wide-eyed into the camera, painting a picture of her client as someone who—due to a combination of mental health problems, isolation she suffered as an immigrant without resources, an abusive partner, and superstitions she inherited from her pays natal—came to believe that she was the victim of sorcery and that drowning her beloved daughter was a necessary act of mercy. The speech ends with what one might politely refer to as a rhetorical curveball as the lawyer argues that the reciprocal migration of cells between mother and fetus during pregnancy means that women—Diop is unquestioningly essentialist on this point—remain bonded to their children at a cellular level throughout their lives. We can infer from this that the central question of Saint Omer concerns inheritance, with the mother-child relationship functioning as an exemplary case of the general problem faced by any system that must negotiate antagonistic internal elements which can be neither simply integrated nor sublimated away by waving the wand of liberal progress. As the lawyer finishes, Laurence collapses in the dock and the legal professional cradles her weeping client. The camera focuses intermittently on the faces of other women in the court as they are held together in a moment of intense sympathy and reflection. We have, in short, another film about an immigrant from a former colony in which a moment of climactic catharsis comes via an intense sympathetic recognition that is made possible by the processes of the French state.

Souleymane’s Story is to my mind a significantly better film than Saint Omer. Still, I would argue that both works reveal similar political tendencies. These are films that show us characters who are unjustly treated by the country to which they have traveled, and suggest that France has much to learn about the way that it treats members of the populations it once subjected to colonial rule. In both cases, it is striking how much universalizable ethical truth—the kind of truth one might associate with a humanist feeling and the cinema designed to elicit it—is bound up with the spaces through which bourgeois society functions. I would add that there is something recognizably French about Diop’s and Lojkine’s choices to make belief in witchcraft and sorcery central to their characters’ life stories. Whether or not this move is factually coherent, it remains a conspicuous political decision that bolsters a sense of La République as the site of reason over and against the prehistoric elements found in the former colonies. The task of the French state is to reckon with this problematic inheritance and absorb what it can. It follows that ethical judgements regarding justice or injustice concern specific cases whereby this task is carried out, and do not touch on the legitimacy of the project per se.   

That sentimental humanism tends to prop up bourgeois institutions while avoiding radical critique is hardly a new argument. In terms of cinema, it is as old as the desire to generate the kind of raw fidelity to working-class experience that Souleymane’s Story attempts. We see this in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s rejection of the neorealist films that he would both inherit and repudiate. For Pasolini, the work of directors such as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica—whose classic Bicycle Thieves (1948) is surely a reference for Souleymane’s Story—was hindered by its desire to represent purportedly universal ethical values, and was, crucially, “still tied to pre-resistance culture.”1 For all their commitment to a cinema grounded in working-class life, the directors associated with neorealism remained bound to a sentimental progressivism that was insufficiently aware of the intense contradictions at work within postwar Europe, and of the potential therein for a full reorganization of society. Pasolini’s artistic response to this was to try to put on screen the antagonistic and at best amoral energies that he felt coursing through Italy’s subaltern classes. Accordingly, the title character of Accattone (1961), his first feature, is a pimp, a liar, a thief, an abuser of women, and someone pathologically unsuited to work. Eschewing the universalist humanism of Bicycle Thieves, Pasolini’s focus was on the stubborn existences encountered in Rome’s postwar slums. These were lives that could not be integrated into a political or an ethical economy, and that sabotaged the easy dialectic of bad-faith social democrats.

I do not mean to suggest that it would be possible or even desirable to make Accattone now. Exposing the limitations of postwar progressives had a profound value in the decades of the long boom and its accompanying counterrevolutionary smugness. The value of such a move in an age of resurgent fascism is less obvious. Still, thinking about early Pasolini helps make it clearer to me that my problem with Souleymane’s Story is that it is fundamentally a film about integration, and one in which the central character wishes desperately—and for obvious reasons—to be integrated. To construct a humanist tragedy à la de Sica out of this situation, the protagonist must be both worthy of integration, i.e., morally good according to the standards of bourgeois society, and denied what they want due to particular aspects of this same society, i.e., bad immigration policy. This dichotomy plays out in the tension between the immigration worker’s capacity to recognize the virtuous qualities of Souleymane’s narrative and her complete powerlessness when it comes to helping him change his situation. Cinema in which catharsis comes from this kind of contradiction leaves questions about the radical reorganization of society, which are also surely questions of other more profound forms of recognition, unasked. None of this is to say that there are not many people like Souleymane in France. Lojkine’s film is eloquent testimony to the fact that they deserve to live lives free from fear and to enjoy an equal share of the happiness that their labor makes possible for other people. What the film does not make clear, however, is that so does everybody else.