A portrait of France, a portrait of Marseilles
“It’s not just Soprano the artist”, insists the rapper: by watching “Soprano, à la vie, à la mort”, we quickly understand that we are not only following Soprano’s musical affairs, but on the contrary that we are going to discover (or rediscover) how the life of a kid from the northern districts of Marseille can switch between the 80s and 90s, to become a French superstar.
It is a historical and sociological stroll (but also musical, that we reassure ourselves) that the series offers us, drawing parallel lines between the destiny of Soprano and that of other Marseilles of his generation, that he either tragic (the assassination of Ibrahim Ali by FN posters) or stratospheric (Zinedine Zidane, who even made an appearance). Marseille thus becomes the quasi-star of this documentary.
But the strength of the film directed by Céline Jallet, Anthony Igoulen and Yoan Zerbit is to derive universality from the anecdotal. Beyond the unpublished archive images of his primary school teacher or the first Soprano dance competition, it is finally a whole life that is reconstructed: that of a youth having grown up in the towers of housing estates, having discovered the rap with the show “HIPHOP” on TF1… A youth that today makes up a large part of the citizens of France. And of which Soprano and his friends are one of the examples.