Selma flees Syria leaving behind a six-year-old son and a husband who’s disappeared into the prisons of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. When she arrives in Bordeaux, she works on the black in a bistro while seeking official asylum. When she meets Jérôme, a lawyer who frequents her place of work, something stronger than solidarity develops between them. Competing in Bergamo Film Meeting, Gaya Jiji’s second feature film, Pieces of a Foreign Life [+lire aussi :
interview : Gaya Jiji
fiche film] – coming seven years after My Favourite Fabric [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] – is a film which explores exile through emotions rather than social denunciation.

The Syrian director who’s been living in France since 2011 builds up her story through omissions. We don’t see the journey Selma takes through Europe, just fragments of the ship sinking. We don’t bear witness to the daily humiliations of her clandestine life, but we sense them in her demeanour: diffident, armoured, incapable of lowering her guard. She’s determined to be unlikeable, and this is the film’s biggest risk: depicting a woman who doesn’t want to be here, who hasn’t chosen France as her homeland but as a necessary purgatory, and who doesn’t offer audiences the comfort of gratitude or easy hope.

Zar Amir, crowned Best Actress in Cannes 2022 for Holy Spider [+lire aussi :
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interview : Ali Abbasi
interview : Ali Abbasi
interview : Zar Amir Ebrahimi
fiche film], inhabits this character with constant physical tension. Even in moments of seeming serenity – a walk, a dinner – Selma’s body remains alert, ready to withdraw. Opposite her, Alexis Manenti (awarded the Best Male Newcomer César for Les Misérables [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Ladj Ly
fiche film]) plays Jérôme with naturalness and subtlety, as if the character himself were struggling to find his place in the film. Jérôme is a good man trapped in a comfortable and sterile life, who sees in Selma an opportunity to rouse himself but who doesn’t know how – or want – to pay the price.

After painting the careful portrait of a woman who loathes any kind of indulgence, the film ends up surrendering to the pitfalls of melodrama. The twist halfway through the film is predictable, and the second part of the story proves even less surprising than the first. Penned by Gaya Jiji in league with Sarah Angelini, Mehdi Ben Attia and Agnès Feuvre, the screenplay fails to strike the perfect balance between personal urgency and European auteur cinema’s narrative conventions on the topic of refugees.

But what does elevate the film is the director’s ability to follow her characters without judgement. There’s no room for poverty porn here: the Syrians who welcome Selma impose their rules on her, the French lawyer is generous but cowardly… Selma’s bistro colleague (a somewhat underutilised Megan Northam) is the only one who offers her unconditional solidarity, while Antoine Héberlé’s photography portrays an autumnal and melancholy Bordeaux, a city to pass through rather than settle down in.

Pieces of a Foreign Life is an incredibly heartfelt and sensitive film, held back by its association with an overused subgenre. Its merit is the fact that it seeks out a side street – the path of intimist melodrama - to tell a story that’s all too often reduced to clichés. Unfortunately, it’s not personal enough to be memorable.

Pieces of a Foreign Life was produced by Gloria Films and TS Productions, in co-production with France 3 Cinéma and Belgium’s Panache Productions. The film will be distributed in France by Tandem from 17 June. World sales are entrusted to France TV Distribution.