La Faute a Voltaire

"La Faute a Voltaire" ("Voltaire's Fault") opens with Jallel (Sami Bouajila), a newly arrived young Moroccan, receiving advice from an older friend in an immigration center in Paris. Make sure to tell them that you are from Algeria and fleeing political repression. They will be sympathetic since they already feel guilty about Algeria. Also, make sure to tell them how important France is to you because of its devotion to liberty and democracy. They seem to believe that they invented liberty.

With this droll and slightly cynical beginning, we are introduced into the world of the immigrant street peddler, a fixture on the streets of cities like New York and Paris. As soon as Jallel receives a temporary work permit, he finds residence at a hostel where he meets other foreigners in the same precarious situation or Frenchmen barely staying afloat in a world of diminishing economic expectations.

Despite Jallel's bleak prospects, he is determined to make the best of things. After his first day on the job peddling fresh fruit--illegally--in the Metro, he stops off at a bar on the way back to the hostel. When one of the barmaids tells him that she is a Cheb Mami fan, he puts a coin in the jukebox and the pulsating sounds of the Rai master inspires a dance party on the spot for the largely Arab clientele. After too many beers, Jallel ends up dancing on his table reciting Arab poetry at the top of his lungs.

When he wakes up with a hangover the next morning on a subway, he is distressed to discover that his previous day's earnings have completely vanished. Assuming the worst, he marches back to the bar and accuses the barmaid of robbery. Not one to be intimated, she marches up to him and details his extravagant behavior from last evening. Didn't he remember buying drinks for the house? Didn't he remember dancing on the table? And, most importantly, didn't he remember the love poems he read in her honor? The hangover haze begins to lift just at that moment--Jallel sheepishly admits his error and heads for the door.

The barmaid, named Nassera (Aure Atika), feeling a mixture of pity and desire, offers him money to make ends meet. She also invites him to her apartment later that evening after she gets off work. This begins a troubled affair that forms the core of an extended family involving Nassera, a sister Arab barmaid and a motley crew of Jallel's roommates at the hostel. At the bottom of Paris's social rungs, they find ways to make life pleasant and come to each other's rescue when things get tough. When Paul, a Frenchman and Buddhist member of their crew runs off to Tibet, he bequeaths his driver's license to Jallel. By replacing the photo, Jallel has something to show the cops when he is hassled in the Metro.

"La Faute a Voltaire" shows the sunny side of immigrant life. In the spirit of "La Boheme," it does not take much for these characters to break out into song or dance. Since Abdel Kechiche, the young Moroccan director, started out as an actor, it is no surprise that the film focuses more on character development than elaborate plot mechanisms. It is basically a picaresque tale whose parts are much greater than the whole. It is, I would add, in utter contrast to the gargantuan waste of money and talent of the preceding evening's Academy Award ceremonies which dramatized the cultural decline of American imperialism. For life, drama and beauty, one must turn toward the modestly financed ventures of young first-time directors like Abedl Kechiche whose heart is with the masses who have the power to abolish the social relations which are responsible for closed borders and Russell Crowe movies.

("La Vaut a Voltaire" was shown as part of the yearly series "New Directors/New Films", which runs from March 23 to April 8. It is curated by The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art Department of Film and Video.)