At the beginning, it’s what we usually call a “good film.” All the signals are both clear and favorable, as we get to know its heroine, Selma, having survived a perilous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea, stuck in Hungary and finally stranded in Bordeaux. The young woman works there illegally and tries to bring her child back to the country.
What signals? We have known for several years now that the Franco-Iranian Zar Amir Ebrahimi is a remarkable actress. We remember that the Syrian director Gaya Jiji presented an astonishing film six years ago at the Cannes Film Festival, in the midst of the terror imposed on her people by Bashar al-Assad, My favorite fabric (2018), located in Damascus. And everything tilts in favor of what the scenario is immediately focused on, drawing attention to the undignified fate imposed on the exiles, at a time when the extreme right is boasting of having made Europe even more selfish and inhospitable.
But here it is, The Stranger is much better than a “good film” and much richer than telling realities that deserve to be told through very present characters. And this for a simple reason, Selma is not limited to what would appear on her police file or a TV movie pitch: migrant, undocumented, mother of a little boy.
She is a woman, a human being, inhabited by impulses and desires, gray areas and secrets. And around her, this lawyer who will take her side, the owner of the bistro who employs and exploits her or the young colleague with rebellious vitality exist beyond their function in a story mechanism. This will be even more the case for those who arrive from Syria, but also from the city itself where the whole story takes place. Each and everyone exists with their share of autonomy and singularity.
Gaya Jiji’s second feature film finds an unexpected energy in its ability to accompany beings, tensions, secrets, to follow fault lines, while telling the main story, which becomes neither a setting nor a pretext. It is the staging choices that build, scene after scene, what makes the same movement the emotional force of The Stranger
and the political correctness of his approach, which does not reduce anyone, especially not a woman, a child, a man in exile, to a single category, nor to programmed behavior. Better still, this space of possible autonomy also applies to the other protagonists.
Precise on the procedures to which everyone is subjected, including the physical violence that many exiles are forced to inflict on themselves, the film chooses to look before judging, to allow what is experienced to be perceived, including what is contradictory or very objectionable, rather than stating what should be thought of it.
What is beautiful in The Stranger does what its title suggests. This carries the idea that Selma, an undocumented Syrian migrant, is also foreign to all role and archetype assignments. It indicates that the film accompanies something uncertain and fragile, respectful of a possibility of inventing something other than submission to inevitabilities, whether historical, legal, gendered, sentimental or scriptural.
