THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – MUST SEE
Karim Bensalah, more or less unknown, twenty years of short films behind him, released his first feature film through tenacity, a pleasant surprise. Hijacking the title of one of the most famous HBO series (Six Feet Under), the director signs a fair and delicate training novel where, like the series, the business of death learns to live better.
At the center of the story, which takes place in Lyon, the young Sofiane, son of an Algerian diplomat on the verge of retirement, plays the part of a young man who invents an underworld identity, without religion or ties, in love with pleasures specific to his age, responding only to his desire. It could very well go like that. Except that Sofiane, all about her bum life, has somewhat forgotten her studies, which nevertheless gave her the right to reside on French territory.
The film begins at the moment when his life is turned upside down, under the influence of an expulsion order taking effect in a month. His father could no longer help him, so only a job and a work certificate would save him. Here he was recommended to a cousin of his father, who runs a Muslim funeral business in Roubaix (North). Who, promising him his certificate if he proves himself, immediately puts him in the hands of El Haj, a tall, dark and mute guy who imposes, never cracks a smile, terrorizes the waiter of the halal fast food, considers , basically, life from a significantly different angle than that of Sofiane. El Haj is the tradition made man, the ritual of accompanying the dead, the washing of the body, the humility and the dignity of a ministry of final ends.
Work certificate
El Haj, in a word, is everything that Sofiane, in the arrogance of his golden youth, does not want to know about himself, everything that he flees, everything that, without admitting it to himself, horrifies him. However, he will have to go through this, that he will communicate with his tutor, that he will submit to the virtues of a spirituality to which he wanted to be foreign, if he wants one day to have this damned work certificate . We fear, for a moment, that a rather easy lesson in moral rigor will weigh down the story. It won’t happen. On the contrary, the film advances by becoming more complex, in the stubborn conquest of an identity, which will find under the Nice sun (the film offers a spiritual and climatic journey) a sort of subtle and ironic redemption. We could even say that he takes the most difficult path to take today, in an era ravaged by Manichaeism: that of compromise, of a sense of nuance, of the right measure of things, of non-resignation, so to speak, to the law of the stupidest.
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