You can tell you're early in the evolution of a society's acceptance of a minority group when most of its movies about that subculture star people from the dominant culture, focusing on how their eyes are opened or their lives enriched by their contact with someone from the minority. That template fits most of the movies I've seen about the illegal immigrants pouring into the U.S. and Europe these days, and Welcome is no exception. But it's better than most, a modestly scaled movie that's a minor success.
A little too pat and simplistic, Welcome is not nearly as good as Laurent Cantet's emotionally raw and complex The Class or Jacques Audiard's searing A Prophet., but it's a whole lot better than the overpraised The Visitor, which was to illegal immigrants what Gentleman's Agreement was to Jews and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner to African Americans.
The main character in Welcome is Simon Calmat (Mademoiselle Chambon star Vincent Lindon), a sad-eyed former swimming champ who makes a living teaching water aerobics and swimming lessons at a public pool in Calais. In the midst of a divorce from a wife he's still crazy about, Simon has slid pretty deep into major depression when Bilal (Firat Ayverdi), a bright-eyed Kurdish kid from Iraq, pops up in his pool.
Bilal has emigrated illegally from Iraq to Calais in a difficult and dangerous journey that included a stint on a cargo truck, his head inside a plastic bag so his breathing won't activate the sensors installed to detect the presence of carbon dioxide. He manages to get 4,000 kilometers from home, but his goal is the other side of the English Channel, where the girl he loves has recently moved with her family. He asks Simon to teach him to swim, figuring that's his best shot for getting to England.
Calais has erected a thicket of barriers to discourage illegal immigrants. At first, Simon seems to have done the same, but Bilal breaks down his resistance. Simon sees himself in the boy, identifying first with his athleticism and then with his romanticism. And as the two grow closer, Simon takes more risks to help the boy achieve his dream.
We learn a lot more about Simon's life than we do Bilal's (we never see where Bilal sleeps or get a sense of how he spends his time when he isn't with Simon), but their stories are given almost equal emotional weight. What's more, letting Bilal into his life doesn't magically transform Simon or solve any of his problems, and Simon's help is not enough to help Bilal triumph over all the obstacles piled up in his path. Paired with Lindon's and Ayverdi's emotional transparency and both characters' fundamental decency, that humanistic orientation and relatively realistic story arc give this heartfelt movie some emotional heft. But in the end, what resonates most is the political context in which the filmmakers situate this twist on a father-son melodrama.
To surface the dehumanizing brutality routinely encountered by the political and economic refugees who are flooding the Western world and largely ignored by the rest of us, we hear both from and about cops who arrest immigrants and the people who help them. We also see several examples of a perhaps even more chilling trend: the collusion of private citizens, like the xenophobic neighbor whose welcome mat earns a sardonic look from Simon and gives the movie its title.
All that demonization and repression reanimates the ghost of another evil time in France's not-so-distant past—and our own. As Simon's ex puts it, after trying to stop a supermarket security guard from ejecting a couple of immigrants while Simon and several other customers watched mutely: "You know what banning people from stores means? Want me to buy you a history book?"
The initial comment that early movies about subcultures mostly star those from the dominant culture is really striking and insightful. But I loved The Visitor–I thought it was sensitive and quiet. However, I'll need to see this and the other movies you mention so that I have a basis of comparison–and then maybe I'll agree.
Hey, Dorothy. thanks for your comments — it's good to know someone is enjoying reading this stuff as much as I'm enjoying writing it.
I'm one of the few people I know who didn't like The Visitor — though I was glad to see that Ed Gonzalez here at Slant had the same reaction I did. I'd never try to talk you out of loving it even if I could; we all have our own opinions about movies, and so much of this is just a matter of taste. But I think it's a fact that the immigrants in The Visitor play the kind of role I was talking about in the intro of this piece: they're just the catalysts for a white guy's epiphany.
Maybe people who identify with the Richard Jenkins character's emotional blockage and release can enjoy the movie on those terms, regardless of what or who triggered it — but I shouldn't try to guess at what other people liked about it. All I can say for sure is what I didn't like, which was the way it shoved the stories of its immigrant characters way into the background, making what promised at first to be a story about some very appealing and sympathetic illegal immigrants who were facing some very tough challenges into a, to me, much less interesting tale about the psychological growth and self-actualization of a privileged, self-pitying American.
That may be a little too harsh an assessment of that depressed professor, and it's not like I haven't loved other movies about privileged people who are emerging out of a major depression or learning to live life more fully or whatever. But to me, The Visitor reeks of an insular world view and smug self-regard that just pisses me off.