Andalucia

In his second feature, the French-Senegalese film maker Alain Gomis again investigates themes such as identity (or its loss) and the relationship between the individual and society. In Andalucia the individual is personified by the gangling, much too tall, Yacine, a 30-something of Algerian descent who doesn't manage to convert his talents as a social worker into getting a steady job in Paris because of his permanent inner unrest and the aggrievedness that plagues him. So Gomis has his protagonist live in a caravan, away from his family, roaming from job to job and from woman to woman. Yacine's dreams are great but not very concrete and he compares himself to his own detriment with people who have got on more than him. This makes him impotently violent, but also genuinely curious about the conditions and laws that shape the lives of those of his compatriots whom he regards as being more successful. Those with whom he eventually feels most at home are the homeless he gives soup to and a group of Senegalese he acts with in a wonderful episode as an extra with a French-language film about the slave trade. The dreamy, fragmentary form of the film slowly but surely opens a world that eventually takes Yacine to Andalucia. It looks as if the imagination can finally become reality here.