Waiting for a Welcome
By Rebecca Park, Contributor
Welcome, the title is laden with irony. Recently shown at the French Embassy’s La Maison Française, this tale of a young Kurd fleeing Iraq captures the uncertainty of his limbo-like stay in France, where the last word he is likely to hear is “bienvenue.”
The French movie is a vivid illustration of the old trope “so close, yet so far.” Bilal has abandoned a semi-settled life in his native country to pursue dreams of working, earning money, and, because this is a movie, getting the girl. His ultimate goal is England, where his girlfriend Mina has already arrived with her family, but first he must find a way to cross the English Channel from Calais.
So here we have a temporary stay of indefinite length, where both the host and the guest are unhappy with the situation. Not only must Bilal deal with the physical challenge of crossing national borders sans papers and the emotional drain of loneliness and nostalgia. He also faces the hard routine of a refugee living on the margins, the fights (with fellow displaced countrymen and natives of momentarily adopted France) for food, shelter and a hint of stable normalcy.
The anxious claustrophobia with which Bilal struggles daily comes alive through the film’s somber design. A confusion of languages—Kurdish, French, English—evokes a world of mis-communication, where even the audience occasionally has trouble following accented conversations. Crowds of refugees and Frenchmen jostle the screen, vying not for attention but the chance to slip away unnoticed. Cramped London is bright but never cheerful, while wide open Calais with its postcard panoramic Norman beaches is always lost in a heavy fog of gray shadows and mist.
Those beaches become invested with hope as the movie progresses. Bilal enlists the help of a local swim coach, Simon, to train him to swim across the Channel, a last-ditch effort to riskily reunite with Mina. The movie weakens with the introduction of a complicated subplot involving Simon and his soon-to-be-ex-wife Marion, a domestic divorce drama that distracts from the central tension of Bilal’s story. His interior conflicts reek a bit too much of an overheated suburban melodrama, out-of-place considering the life-and-death decisions with which Bilal has been playing throughout the movie. But as the two characters grow side-by-side, the audience gleams an underdeveloped glimmer of hope of the cooperation possible between the two sides, the foreigner and the native, the lost wanderer and the established Westerner.
Welcome isn’t the kind of film to be received with wide open arms on this side of the Atlantic. It’s a bit too slow in its quietly unfolding plot, too artsy in its obsession with minute details, too political with its message written wide across the screen. But it’s the kind of film we need right now, with its humanist approach to depicting the plight of the illegal alien, refugee of a war-torn country, reject no matter where he lands. So here’s hoping that Welcome can find some sort of welcome in our land of the free, home of the brave, and melting pot of immigrant peoples and cultures.
Return to Main Menu |
