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SARAH LEONOR: THE GREAT MAN/LE GRAND HOMME (2014)

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RAMZAN IDIEV AND SURHO SUAIPOV IN THE GREAT MAN

A wild leopard, a boy, and two fathers

Sarah Leonor is a gifted and idiosyncratic director. This is her second film. Her first, A Real Life/Au voleur, featured the fascinating, tragically short-lived son of Gérard Depardieu, Guillaume. Here arguably she tells more of a story, one of friendship, heroism, loyalty, fatherhood, and a boy's search for his father, in the context of being an immigrant without papers. It's a richly emotional tale that's told both in a fable-like, poetic way and in the terms of a breathless thriller. Seen as part of an edition of New Directors/New Films disappointingly thin in good stories, The Great Man/Le grand homme is a tale and slice of life that offers meaty rewards. It's no harm that the terrific Jérémie Renier gives un unusually vigorous and committed performance here as the bosom Foreign Legion war buddy who becomes a surrogate father for the boy who's cut off by the crossfire of global politics, war, and bad luck.

Jordan Mintzer reviewed the film at Toronto for Hollywood Reporter, speaking of the way it evokes memories of Claire Denis’s Beau Travail "with its stylistic flourishes and hardworking French Legionnaires," and also "Michael Haneke’s 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance with its splintered portrait of illegal aliens scraping by in the big city."

It's hard to get one's head around the events that Leonor skillfully weaves together in her film -- sometimes in a crabwise fashion that evokes Claire Denis further. We begin with the voice-over spoken by a youth. He turns out to be the Chechen boy, Khadji (Ramzan Idiev) son of Markov (non-actor Surho Sugaipov). It is clear he is idolizing his father. The background event, almost legendary, is when Markov and his fellow Foreign Legionaire Hamilton (Jérémie Renier) are tracking a wild leopard in a desert war zone, at the end of their posting in Afghanistan. When there's an ambush, Markov saves Hamilton, but this is considered an abdication of the Legion's rigid code, which Markov later recites to Khadji. An ambush results in an abdication of duty—despite it stemming from an act of fidelity. Hamilton is sent to France for treatment, and Markov is mustered out, though both are encouraged to reenlist.

We jump forward to France, where Hamilton is recovering from two bullet wounds and Markov finds Khadji, whom he hasn't seen for five years. Perhaps the best sequence in the film is the one where Markov, speaking first Chechan, then French, struggles to win back Khadji's trust, while the angry boy refuses to speak anything but French, as they ride a Seine Bateau Mouche. The film is shot through with the mystique of the French Foreign Legion, through which Markov, Hamilton, and eventually Khadji, share: macho idealism and hope that provides a substitute for the lost mother and homeland, presumably. If these ideas don't feel quite digested, and Renier's acting seems a bit overemphatic at times, it all fits with the film's primary loyalty to the unrealistic but passionate sensibility of the young boy who has lost, regained, and then again lost his father, and then found another. In these circumstances and with this point of view, the film can be a melodrama that's over-the-top, and yet seem perfectly right for the devastating, touching subject matter. Surho Sugaipov is touching as the Chechan father, Ramzan Idiev even more so as the boy, who quietly shoulders the film's central role. A compass, a motorcycle, a deluxe hotel, train rides, a tent, and trips inside and outside Paris are skillfully used to build up the boy's picture of events and the 24 hours of urban thriller that are the film's key third act.

The Great Man/Le grand homme, 107 mins., opened in Paris 13 August 2014 to very favorable reviews (AlloCiné press rating 3.4). It debuted at Toronto's Discovery section in September 2014. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 FSLC-MoMA series, New Directors/New Films. A Distrib Films release.

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