For his first feature film, Louda Ben Salah-Cazanas tells the course of a young man from Algerian immigration who tries to make a living in Paris.
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The first feature film of Louda Ben Salah-Cazanas, presented at the Berlinale 2021, wears a title that looks like a book by Nicolas Mathieu, their children after them (south acts, Goncourt, 2018). As the latter, he has the will to write the intimate and political narrative of a youth who must find his way in a world of gross, at the crossroads. Here, a class transfer, a nascent love story and the artist’s life. But unlike the first who follows a myriad of characters in the east of France, Le Monde After us attaches to a young man in love in Paris.
Originally from Lyon where his parents hold a coffee, Labidi was mounted at the capital to publish a novel about the Algerian war, echoing his family history, paternal side. This is there, between small bouties and ripened drafts, which it tries to reconcile dream of recognition, married life and financial. While the film draws a painting of the time of the widespread subcontracting, Labidi, Delivero’s delivery and glasses seller, remains at the threshold of its roles, occupying vis-à-vis its bosses and its Customers a spectator position, he who caresses the dream of becoming an artist and a good husband.
So chooses, more romantic, to throw himself under a truck or to stage a burglary to earn bigger with the insurance and offer to his dulcinated, still a student, a more comfortable life. If the director’s tender look finds in this way his fulfillment, his way of rounding the angles of precariousness does not allow to bring social criticism to the end but managed to move the film to a more intimate place.
Intense air calls
at low noises and over the scenes, Le Monde After bringing the central issue of transmission with what it involves debt and guilt. Half French half Algerian – “But it does not see each other on me,” he says – Labidi abandons his novel about the war to talk about his daily efforts. While we could fear this double choice of autofiction and film in the film (strongly inspired by the life of the director), [Nute] after us thickered from a feeling of nostalgia when he confronts the youth of Labidi to that of his parents: the allers and returns of the young man between Lyon and Paris create intense air calls that connect him to the inaugural trip of his father of Algeria for France.
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