One look at the poster for A Season in France (Une saison en France) might lead you to believe that this film, written and directed with great insight and empathy by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, is a feel-good triumph against considerable odds.
It is anything but of course, with the understated nuanced narrative rarely veering from the bleak reality of life for many refugees who flee their home countries in search of a life free from political violence, societal unrest and active discrimination only to find their hoped-for sanctuary no more welcoming in many cases than the broken reality they have left behind them.
Part of a wider narrative which sees over 66 million people forcibly displaced around the world, and almost 23 million people classified as refugees, A Season in France beautifully and heartbreakingly tells the story of Abbas Mahadjir (Eriq Ebouaney) who flees with his family from the Central African Republic (CAR) capital Bangui when violence makes it impossible for the well-educated French teacher to keep his family safe.
With his wife Madeleine (Sandra Nkake) killed by militia during their escape, which sees them having to abandon everything that defined their former lives, Abbas and his two children, son Yacine (Ibrahim Burama Darboe) and daughter Asma (Aalayna Lys), arrive in France broken and dispirited but nonetheless hopeful that life can only get better from here.
In certain important ways that promise holds true.
Yacine and Asma are happily enrolled in school, Abbas has found new love, 19 months later, with fellow market stallholder Carole Blaszak (Sandrine Bonnaire), and they occupy a modern apartment which provides comfort, and more importantly, a place of physical belonging for the children who are finding the change in their circumstances increasingly difficult to handle.
Appearances can be deceiving however.
It turns out the apartment is on loan from a friend or benefactor who is due back shortly, and while the kids are happy at school, they miss having their own rooms, and the life they once led in Bangui which it is intimated was comfortably middle class by CAR standards.
Abbas’ relationship with Carol, though warm and intimate, is stricken by the former’s inability to move on from the grief of losing his beloved Madeleine, with the normal sense of grievous loss that affects anyone in that situation by the trauma in which the death took place and the ongoing stress caused by not knowing if France will approve their claim for asylum.
Sadly, as it turns out, Abbas has his claim turned down, as does Uncle Etienne (Bibi Tanga), who is a close family member or friend – it’s never formerly established but is almost immaterial with the two men as close as family can be – plunging men already on the precipice into further despair and a growing, grinding sense of futility and loss of self-worth.
There is no sugarcoating how existentially and physically imperiling this is for everyone concerned and A Season in France, which allows the events to unfold without melodramatic fanfare or gilded polemic, doesn’t attempt to hide how devastating this is for people already worn by having their futures perpetually hanging in the balance every last minute of every day.
With only 30 days to go until he must leave France, Abbas, along with Etienne, is confronted by the nightmarishness of having nowhere to go – they can’t return to CAR, fewer and fewer countries are accepting refugees – only 189,300 refugees were resettled in 2016, a drop in the bucket given the total number cited above – and no real workable options.
Carole tries her best to be supportive, even allowing the family to move in with her when Abbas, who loses his job in the emotional aftermath of losing his battle to remain in France, has nowhere else to go.
But despite her great love for Abbas and the children and her willingness to perjure herself to police to protect him, she cannot compete with circumstances which seem to be conspiring in a political storm of political indifference, heartlessness and outright violence – Etienne shack on a discarded block of land is burnt to the ground taking his precious philosophy books and tenuous sense of place with it – and ultimately loses out to a sequence of events which cannot be averted and which do not produce anything even remotely approaching a happy ending.
For many people such as Abbas, there is no happy ending.
While he works hard to create a happy family idyll for the children – there are moments of real joy and contentment, largely due to Abbas’ grim determination to conjure them out of nothing and protect his kids where he can – and life holds promise with Carole, he and Etienne are all too aware that there is no way, despite their initial hopes, to fulfill the promise that carried them from their much-missed home country to their hoped-for new life in France.
It is sobering to watch Abbas struggle to maintain hope when even stoic, philosophical Etienne is throwing in the towel and yet he does precisely that because he has no other choice with his children hanging onto the thin dream that life may yet return to normal.
It is an invidious soul-destroying position to be in and A Season In France presents the horror of losing your sense of place, self-worth, belonging and a host of other things that may us who we are, in all its catastrophic enormity.
That it does so without histrionic overplaying is testament to the subtlety and power of Haroun’s script and an understanding, sadly lacking in many of the callously-violent opponents of refugee resettlement and heightened immigrant intakes, of how dehumanising being in the position that Abbas occupies can be for a person.
A Season in France succeeds in helping those with ears to hear and hearts to feel, and hopefully those may be opposed but open, to put themselves in the position of refugees like Abbas as family, hopefully reminding us that there but the grace of whatever god you believe in there go I, and urging us with its quietly-insistent voice to understand that all these people want is what we have – the ability to live in peace and be safe, look after themselves and their loved ones and pursue the things that matter to them, a fundamental right that is surely the preserve of everyone and not just those fortunate to be in countries free from strife.