Rating: 4/5
Verdict: Compelling French refugee tale
A nuanced and complicated drama about refugees in the heart of Europe, this terrific French movie boils with a quiet rage. It's easily the equal of Tom McCarthy's The Visitor, the film it most readily recalls, but director and co-writer Lioret has something more specific in his sights than the suspicion of Muslims in a post-9/11 world: his target is the French law forbidding acts of kindness to people with nothing - which lends the film's title a bitter irony.
Vincent Lindon, the craggy Everyman who starred in recent release Anything For Her, plays Simon, a one-time swimming champ who coaches beginners at the local pool while he nurses the fresh pain of an unwanted but amicable divorce from Marion (Audrey Dana).
He's in Calais, the port town on the northern French coast which is Europe's closest point to the UK. Here, in the shadows around an eerie expanse of lorry lights and gantries, refugees gather, hoping to stow away on lorries bound for Britain and living in a legal limbo: they are fed at soup kitchens run by NGOs with a spiky relationship with the cops but the locals are banned from helping them.
When Simon crosses paths with Bilal (Firat Ayverdi), a 17-year-old Kurd, he ignobly senses a chance to ingratiate himself with his activist ex-wife who hates his disengagement from the refugees' plight. But the relationship between the youngster and the older man develops in an unexpected way that places both of them in danger.
The economical script is precisely calibrated to interweave Simon's story with Bilal's, while making room for a heartrending subplot involving the young woman in London that Bilal hopes to marry. The few scenes those two share, on opposite ends of a telephone line, draw some of their emotional wallop from the fact that the two actors are siblings but they also manage to hint at the endless sadness of people everywhere separated by ideology and indifference.
In positioning itself as a bleak anti-romantic drama, Welcome invites the charge that it pulls its political punches in favour of offering an analgesic to complacent liberals, but it's too smart a film for that. It doesn't offer us the comfort of a happy ending, for a start, and it lets its central character be a flawed man of suspect motives rather than a crusader. The result is a film that is both morally compelling and dramatically satisfying.
Cast: Vincent Lindon, Firat Ayverdi, Audrey Dana
Director: Philippe Lioret
Running time: 110 mins
Rating: M (violence, offensive language) In English, Kurdish and French with English subtitles
