121 min | NR | February 23, 2024 | Cohen Media Group
Two cousins leave Dakar chasing a dream of Europe. Matteo Garrone walks them across the Sahara and into the hands of every smuggler, jailer, and thug who profits from desperation. The journey is gorgeous and the journey is hell, and Garrone refuses to let you pick just one.
Seydou and Moussa are teenage cousins in Dakar. They save money in secret, dreaming of Europe, where they imagine fame and a life bigger than the one Senegal offers them. They leave without telling their families and walk into a journey that strips the dream to its bones. Matteo Garrone builds the film as a hero’s odyssey told from the side history usually erases. The real subject is what a body endures when borders treat it as cargo.
Seydou Sarr plays Seydou with an open face that registers every betrayal before he understands it. He begins as a boy who believes in his own luck. He ends as someone who has learned what survival costs. Moustapha Fall plays Moussa with a swagger that masks fear, and the cousins’ bond carries the film through its worst stretches. Issaka Sawadogo plays Martin, a fellow traveler whose practical decency cuts through the cruelty around him. Hichem Yacoubi plays Ahmed, and the menace he brings to the desert detention scenes lingers after he leaves the frame.
Garrone and his co-writers Massimo Ceccherini, Massimo Gaudioso, and Andrea Tagliaferri ground the script in the testimony of people who made the crossing. The cinematography turns the Sahara into something vast and golden, and that beauty becomes its own argument. Garrone permits a single flourish of magical realism in the desert that breaks from the surrounding realism, and the image earns its risk. The sound design tightens through the Libyan prison sequences until the silence between blows does more work than any score. The film moves with the rhythm of distance, slow across the sand and frantic at the water.
The film makes one choice worth questioning. Its frames are so composed and so lovely that the horror sometimes reads as spectacle. A crossing this brutal loses some of its edge when every image is this gorgeous. Garrone bets that beauty will pull viewers toward a story they would otherwise refuse to watch, and the bet mostly pays off. He turns a statistic into a face, and that face does not leave.