a sports melody, an odyssey from Oceania to Ovalia

THE TV TEAM – TUESDAY 1^RE AUGUST AT 8:50 P.M. – FILM

In the cinema, the rules of sports fiction are as precise and restrictive as those of the International Rugby Board: you need an outsider with a very high rating who imposes himself, triumphing both over the adversary and over adversity. At the end of Mercenary, the first fiction feature film by Sacha Wolff, Soane, the hero, a Wallisian rugby player who came from New Caledonia to play in the south-west of France, followed this course to the letter. But it is not enough to win, you also need the way. And that of Sacha Wolff, until now a documentary filmmaker, is extraordinary.

Each of the stages of the tormented journey of Soane (Toki Pilioko) is treated as the crossing of an unknown land by an explorer. It is an odyssey, in the strict sense of the term, which exposes the hero to all perils – love, money, physical pain. Noticed by Abraham (Laurent Pakihivatau), a recruiter with Mafia methods, the young man (he is not yet 20 years old) is sent to France in place of a heavier, more experienced pillar.

Escape the clichés

Soane wants to leave to escape the abuse of an alcoholic father (Petelo Sealeu), but arriving in France, rejected by the club boss who had bought him, he ends up landing in a second-class team. They stuff him with illegal products, he faces the xenophobia of some of his teammates, and meets love in the person of Coralie (Iliana Zabeth), a cashier whose self-esteem is almost worth that of her new lover (“I’m the fat one that everyone fucks”).

It is probably his experience as a documentary filmmaker that allows Sacha Wolff to escape the clichés: to stage the rugby player’s declaration of love to Coralie, the director uses what he has learned from Wallisian custom. When it comes to filming the confrontation between the recruiter and the foal that has escaped him, he sets up his camera in Lourdes and populates the screen with the faces of the Virgin.

Despite its melodramatic nature, Mercenary contains only a limited percentage of match scenes, filmed with an eye for precision which should make them accessible to the ignorant, while satisfying the connoisseurs of rugby. The scenario lingers longer on the dodged doping controls, the brutality on the ground, the hateful rivalries in the locker room.

Sacha Wolff, a beginner in fiction, is already a master in the art of manipulating characters and the spectator. The portrait of the inhabitants of the periphery, the Wallisians of New Caledonia, responds to that of the sports proletariat represented by the players of small teams. Between the two flourishes a beautiful character, who begins the film like a mute block to become an example of eloquence.