After the vibrant Shéhérazade, which won 3 Césars on its release, Jean-Bernard Marlin unveils his new film, Salem, in theaters May 29, 2024. A plunge into Marseille's tough neighborhoods, the scene of two rival gangs where the law of retaliation prevails over the laws of the Republic. While we might have expected another documented fiction from the French director, he injects a welcome dose of the fantastic andesoteric, taking the film to new horizons.
Djibril(Dalil Abdourahim) is a young Comorian from Les Sauterelles, a neighborhood in Marseille. He is in love with Camilla(Maryssa Bakoum), a gypsy from the rival Grillons neighborhood. When she tells him she's pregnant, Djibril asks her to have an abortion to avoid starting a clan war. Is love - even at the age of 14 - stronger than social injunctions and the rules established by the patriarchy of big brothers?
Although Salem seems to start out as a modern rewrite of the Shakespearean drama Romeo and Juliet - with the affrication as verse - Jean-Bernard Marlin quickly loses interest in this impossible teenage romance - a theme already explored in his previous film - in favor of a taut action film with far greater richness and genuine magical fantasy.
The murder of one of Djibril's friends before his very eyes will set the two towns ablaze. Under the sweltering sun, the weight of guilt. Traumatized, Djibril gradually sinks into madness and begins to have daydreams, marvelously captured in hallucinatory visions set to bewitching ethereal music. He is convinced that a curse has befallen the neighborhood and decides to keep his child at all costs. For him, only his daughter Ali(Wallen El Gharbaoui) can save them from the chaos.
Between two confrontations (and a rather clumsy allegory of cockfighting), Salem offers some real moments of tension in this maze of decrepit slabs - including a shootout scene in a caravan worthy of a Western - but it's above all the character of Djibril, ultimately rather inglorious, who crystallizes all the attention. While it's true that he cures the death he sows, we, like Ali, are skeptical about his prophetic visions. Are we really to believe that cicadas and bats will descend on Marseille, like so many wounds to be healed? That's the mystery of the film.
Between religion (in the messianic figure of Ali) and occultism (decidedly fashionable in the suburbs at the moment), Jean-Bernard Marlin once again attempts to pinpoint the birth of social violence in the Marseilles underworld, and the quest for redemption. But this time, without romanticism or naturalism - quite the contrary.
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