Romeo and Juliet in the hood has existed as a well-worn riff on Shakespeare for some time, but in the right hands it can still feel sharp when folded into a larger tableau. That’s the case with Salem, Jean-Bernard Marlin’s follow-up to his César winning Shéhérazade, which also faced charges of unoriginality, but with his new film Marlin impressively broadens his scope in both the way he develops his narrative and the visual choices he makes. The deeply ambitious storytelling occasionally loses some minor plot points (could there be footage on the editing floor?), yet the film develops a satisfying orchestral unity as it traces a Comorian teen boy in the Marseille projects whose forbidden relationship with a Roma girl leads to both tragedy and magical redemption. Marked by bold filmmaking, including striking CGI work, and featuring a committed cast of non-profs, Salem may be viewed more on Netflix but deserves to be seen on the big screen.
As with Shéhérazade, Marlin’s sophomore feature is shot in similar hard-scrabble locales and at least in the first chapter (the film is divided into three) focuses on marginalized teens playing on the edges of criminality. Jibril (Dalil Abdourahim) is fourteen at the start, first seen in a tender embrace with his girlfriend Camilla (Maryssa Bakoum). They shouldn’t be together, not because he’s of African origin and she’s Roma, but like the Sharks and the Jets of West Side Story, the division between those living in the Locust projects and those in the Cricket projects is insurmountable. The opening of the couple in a trailer, yellowed light filtering through the tinted windows, has a tactile sensuality discreetly interrupted by Jibril’s young sidekick Shakur (Mohamed Soumare) looking in from outside.
The Locusts’ kingpin Black Cat (Amal Issihaka Hali) orders Jibril to end his relationship, though when Camilla tells him she’s pregnant he becomes blind to the consequences, loving the idea of his child growing inside her body. Hoping to eventually get Black Cat on his side, he agrees to bring his peer Mahad (Touma Mbae) to the school grounds, just for a talk he’s told, but while he and Shakur look on from atop the toilet stalls, Black Cat pulls out a gun and shoots the boy dead. As he dies, Jibril notices that the glass jar he’d been carrying holding a huge “zombie cicada” has broken and the cicada – soon to be a haunting recurring motif – is released.
In keeping with the Romeo and Juliet origins, Jibril ventures into Cricket territory with Camilla to announce his honorable intentions, but her brother Jason (Rayan Santiago) reacts with fury, beating her up and nearly making her miscarry. In turn, Jibril grabs a gun and heads to Jason’s hood, killing him when he and his pals try to drown Shakur in a fountain. Black Cat coaxes him to give himself up, saying he’ll make sure he’s taken care of once he’s out of the slammer; meanwhile, Jibril keeps seeing visions of Mahad, and once he’s in jail and Camilla has her baby, he reveals to the prison shrink that his daughter “will be there when the sickness comes, to save us all.”
The lesions on Jibril’s body from that point on don’t go away nor are they explained in chapter two, which begins twelve years later when Jibril (Oumar Moindjie) is twenty-six and about to be released from a psychiatric incarceration unit. When an adult Shakur (Rachid Ousseni) comes to take him home, Jibril tells him he has the power to heal people, as does his daughter Ali (Wallenn El Gharbaoui), though he’s yet to see her. Once back home he attempts to reconnect with Camilla (Inès Bouzid) and Ali, but neither are interested; instead he falls back into Black Cat’s orbit, enabling his narcotics business. He’s functioning in the outside world, but he’s convinced he can heal people and bring them back from the dead.
The film’s second and third chapters (the latter lasts perhaps just ten minutes) are its greatest strengths, as Marlin moves the story away from Shakespeare and delves into Jibril’s religious revival and insistence on his powers. Here the canvas feels broader and Salem turns into an increasingly urgent, fascinatingly ambiguous tale of madness, belief and potential salvation. When Jibril says he’s stopped taking his meds because he can’t hear God, the implication is that we’re not meant to believe he has a divine gift, yet we witness his healing powers in action, leading us to question whether the cicadas he sees are only in his mind or real – it’s a testament to Marlin’s skill with non-professionals that Moindjie convincingly pulls off a tremendously difficult role as forces inside and out inexorably close in on his fragile mental state.
Talk of the coming sickness feels very close to home but Marlin ramps up the apocalyptical nature of the impending storm with extremely effective swarms of cicadas that parallel the sense of approaching disaster as Jibril’s mania drives him forward while paradoxically calming his nature: violence seems to be an inescapable inheritance but now so too does mystical healing. It all comes to a breathtaking peak during Eid celebrations, unexpectedly accompanied by Smetana’s sumptuous “Ma Vlast.” By this point Salem feels so assured, its grip so tight, that it’s easy to forgive certain dangling plot threads, such as a corrupt politician (Anthony Krehmeier) introduced but not developed.
Marlin again works with d.o.p. Jonathan Ricquebourg (who shot the more classically rich The Pot au feu, also in this year’s Cannes), but whereas Shéhérazade was marked by a youthful cinema-verité style, Salem is a more mature work, calibrating fixed shots with a hand-held camera according to the scene’s requirements. Interiors are noticeably dark, made even more so by production designer Laurie Colson’s somber wall colors, and the many night scenes contrast with the bright pale light of daytime exteriors. Nicolas Desmaison’s superb editing is also a key to the film’s success, together with the sweeping orchestrations – the Cannes print lacked music credits.
Director: Jean-Bernard Marlin
Screenplay: Jean-Bernard Marlin
Cast: Dalil Abdourahim, Oumar Moindjie, Wallenn El Gharbaoui, Mohamed Soumare, Rachid Ousseni, Maryssa Bakoum, Inès Bouzid, Amal Issihaka Hali, Touma Mbae, Taoufiki Yssoufa, Soilahoudine Ahamadi, Hamada Saïd, Hervé Montagut, Anthony Portelli, Anthony Krehmeier, Souwa Ali, Assia Salimina, Sabine Ahamada, Roukia Abdou, Rayan Santiago
Producers: Bruno Nahon, Thomas Morvan, Jean-Bernard Marlin, Marine Bergère, Romain Daubeach
Cinematography: Jonathan Ricquebourg
Production designer: Laurie Colson
Costume designer: Caroline Spieth
Editing: Nicolas Desmaison
Sound: Cédric Deloche
Production companies: Unité (France), Vatos Locos (France), France 2 Cinéma (France), with the participation of Netflix, France Télévision
World sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Cannes (Un certain regard)
In French
120 minutes
