A Season in France (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, 2017) (Patreon)

Some films grab you immediately. In the first five minutes of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's latest film -- his first made outside his native Chad -- we meet Abbas (Eriq Ebouaney), a refugee from the wartorn Central African Republic. He and his kids are living in a nice urban apartment which, we will soon find out, is a temporary situation that's about to end. In the opening moments of the film, Abbas is startled by the sound of his dead wife Madeleine (Sandra Nkake). He is dreaming, and wakes in fright. He then goes to check on his kids, and his daughter Asma (Aalayna Lys) asks him to sing her the lullaby that her mother used to sing. He does, and she jokes that her daddy sings offkey. But then, we hear the mother's song, and both father and daughter look confused, as if the dead have suddenly permeated this world with voices they, and we, can hear.

This led me to think that A Season in France might be a film that combined the usual plight of the socially marginalized with a bit of movie magic, introducing an affective dimension that was not purely explicable by our narrative identification with Abbas and his family. There really isn't another moment like that in Haroun's film, which is disappointing. I found the film quite moving in its conventionality, but at the same time, I think if I hadn't been familiar with Haroun's earlier work, I might have been a bit less forgiving of its more blatant appeals for middlebrow emtional engagement.

That's because, up to now, Haroun has always struck me as a director whose reach exceeded his grasp. It's not that I didn't think he could make a more conventional film if he wanted to. His Chadian films -- Abouna, Daratt, A Screaming Man, and Grigris -- were all a bit stilted and awkward at various points, as though the typical patterns of editing and actorly verisimilitude were at odds with his symbolic aesthetic. But too often, Haroun seemed content to let allegorical meanings dominate his films while the actual stories being told suffered from plausibility in human motivation. That is, he tended to be an artist who was so attentive to subtext that he often skirted over the text.

There is a bit of that in A Season in France. Much of the subplot involving Abbas's friend Etienne (Bibi Tanga), a reader in philosophy whose been reduced to working security (literally stationed outside a bookstore but not allowed inside), tends toward the overwrought and narratively demonstrative, as if Haroun felt that certain things needed to happen to a character that were simply too horrible to befall a child or a parent, but were still necessary to make sure we understood how desperate the plight of the migrant really is.

We get it, and it's mostly because Abbas, Asma, and Abbas's son Yacine (Ibraham Burama Darboe) are depicted as a loving, struggling family, navigating the banalities of everyday life (homework, getting sick of omelettes for dinner, finding a bowl for Asma's goldfish) and the more specific troubles of seeking asylum through the official channels and (for reasons we as viewers are not privy to) being denied. In the midst of all this turmoil, Abbas has the dubious fortune of falling in love with a co-worker, Carole (Sandrine Bonnaire), who takes his family into her heart and, eventually, her home, but cannot really help them.

There are obvious flaws in A Season in France, but I found it to be Haroun's best film to date, not because it is the one in which he most closely adheres to "Western" representational values, but because its adoption of those approaches seems to clearly strategic. At the same time, the elements of the film that generate the most genuine pathos are those that try so little to do so, that just present ordinary lives in their utter normalcy, demanding that we account for the legal / political clound that hangs over these lives and not others. I couldn't help but think about the people I know who are so vehemently anti-"illegal," who have so little sympathy for those who didn't "follow the rules," watching this film. What do people do when they follow all the rules, to the letter, and discover (to borrow a quote from a popular xenophobe) that the system is rigged?