The problem with Samba is that it can’t decide what kind of film it wants to be. On one hand it wants to treat the plight of the immigrant with respect, highlighting the hardships of those trying to earn a crust in a country that can’t wait to send them home, but on the other it wants to be a cute romantic comedy. Caught between the serious Bienvenue and the frothy Green Card it falls down between two stools, as anyone who has seen those films will know that the only thing they have in common is that they’re both films. Messy.
Samba Cissé (Sy, Days Of Future Past’s Bishop) is a charming Senegalese man living in Paris for ten years. But now he’s on the verge of being deported home and needs mousy legal aid Alice (Gainsbourg) to help build his case. Although she’s warned by a colleague to keep her distance, Alice can’t help being emotionally involved with the handsome Samba but because he may be deported any day, and with Alice suffering from a mental instability (that becomes clear later), they agree to keep things cordial…
Samba opens with a wonderful single shot that moves from a Baz Luhrmann-like choreographed wedding, into the kitchen where four white waiters carry the majestic cake aloft like it’s royalty, and on into the bowels of the kitchen where at the back it finds the Samba and other immigrants cleaning dishes: society spelled out in one single shot. But despite moments of fun – and Samba can be fun and sweet on occasion with Sy and Gainsbourg in engaging performances – the film peaks here.
It peaks because this was the only time in the film that directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toldedano seemed to know what they wanted to do. Thereafter it becomes inconsistent, tonally and thematically. Getting under the skin of the illegal immigrant, they explore the ins and outs of acquiring legal documents and illegal IDs, treating the matter seriously, but then there is the cute Sy-Gainsbourg romance where a horny Tahar Rahim floats about being the wacky best friend you’d find in a throwaway rom-com. When Rahim isn’t around, Sy has to be his own wacky best friend, getting up to some fun antics as a bored night-watchman in a shopping mall. Isn’t this man supposed to be on the cusp of deportation? Half the film is totally at odds with the other.
More was expected from the directors of Intouchable.
