THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
In a time as complicated as ours, it’s not easy to step into the cinematic jungle without kicking your elbows and feeling like you have to hit hard to get noticed. From low floor, the first feature film by Yassine Qnia, is thus presented, at first glance, like a thriller against a background of Franco-Maghrebian sociology. We expect hard, it will not be. In reality, what this film has best is of the order of the lace and relates to the socio-emotional characterization of a weak-minded young person coming from a disadvantaged environment, whom his immaturity prevents from growing up.
The subordination of the thriller to the study of characters is read immediately. Opening onto a junkyard scene, From low floor deliberately conceals the two types of information that would make this operation valuable to us: the locations and the background characters. It is not about a failure of setting in scene, rather of an index of the nature of expedient, of stopgap, which represents this breakage, moreover half organized, in the eyes of the main character. We therefore attend with a light mind, if not elsewhere, before entering the heart of the subject: Mehdi (Soufiane Guerrab), 30 years old, always between his mother and his girlfriend, between the low-level breakages and the refusal of the little ones jobs, between the temptation to take control of one’s destiny and that to settle down.
Sensitive and convincing
Sarah (Souheila Yacoub), her partner and the mother of her little boy, found a job in a hairdressing salon. When they meet again, it has been three months since they last saw each other. We quickly understand that the installation of the couple with Mehdi’s mother fizzled out, that Sarah did not keep up, that Mehdi offered her no alternative. The social significance of the film, never put forward, underlying but significant, is constitutive of its plot: neither Sarah nor Mehdi have enough money to pay rent.
The one that was stolen during the robbery, Mehdi used it to pay for a house in the village for his mother, who never goes there. Good for psychoanalysis, Mehdi goes around in circles, spies on Sarah, enraged, is wrong. It’s proto-Desplechin in Seine-Saint-Denis. He would like to get his family back but does not give himself the means. He trains his friends, Thibault and M’Barek, on a second blow that gives nothing. M’Barek, who had been made to wear pale as a lookout during the first, went there for the second, and it was he, who dreamed of opening a pizzeria, which is today in tin. The excellent M’Barek Belkouk interprets it. All the players here are also sensitive and convincing. Shot in the half-light of Aubervilliers, where the trained surveyor Yassine Qnia spent his youth, From low floor is a delicate and fair film, which never pushes itself off the collar, in which it is enough for its pain and for our constant interest.
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