2023-08-02
N/A
16 min
Returning to Paris, a man moves through memories of his past and surreal fragments of the present, searching for connection with his estranged father. On his journey, he meets a French-Algerian woman. As their intimacy grows, he is confronted with his shame and fears while exploring his lost Arab identity… Behind Paris is Algiers.
"Mounir" (Riz Ahmed) is the Londoner who returns to Paris, the city of his birth, to try and reconnect with his father. This man (Yousfi Henine) arrived from colonial Algeria, changed his name to "Joe" and tried to assimilate into French society. His wife managed to have three kids - by three different men of differing skin colours before she moved to on the UK without him. With a cultural maelstrom both ahead and behind the traveller, we now experience some of his emotions as he reminisces about the past - real and imagined - before meeting "Hafzia" (Souheila Yacoub) who offers him a glimmer of what a future might mean in a city where he has many roots, yet none. There may well be something autobiographical about this short feature from Yann Demange but even so, it's an oddly shallow and meandering wander around the night-spots of Paris accompanied by Ahmed's strained narration. It's telling us all about the contrasting cultures as the Arab meets the Parisian who ends up being a Londoner, but their characterisations offer us little more than you might expect from a romantic "visit Paris" video. Why did we need to know about the colour of his mother's other partners, for example? Isabelle Adjani's cabaret performance adds little but an extra bit of stardom to the credits and I am afraid I just didn't quite see the point of this rather self-indulgent critique of identity.
