Music is everywhere in Saïd Hamich Benlarbi’s Across the Sea [+lire aussi :
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interview : Saïd Hamich Benlarbi
fiche film], shown as a Special Screening in the Cannes Critics’ Week. It surrounds Nour (Ayoub Gretaa), who immigrates – illegally – to Marseille. Everything changes when he meets a cop and his wife (Grégoire Colin and Anna Mouglalis), who live freely and encourage him to do the same. But the decade that follows isn’t easy for Nour.

Cineuropa: There is something very noir-ish about your movie: a cop, a man who is running away from something and a woman they both become involved with.
Saïd Hamich Benlarbi: It’s true, it begins almost like a noir, but then it focuses on the main characters’ relationships of friendship and love. The main reference was melodrama, particularly the films of Douglas Sirk, Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Italian movies like Ettore Scola’s We All Loved Each Other So Much. The idea was to start off with a group of friends and follow their trajectories of exile, but to anchor them in something intimate and to experience things alongside them, through emotion. In this sense, melodrama allowed me to give these characters a strong fictional trajectory.

The triangle that forms later on is intriguing – open, perhaps a bit unconventional. How did you see their affection towards each other?
One of the key ideas that guided me was to question our identity and our sense of belonging. I wanted to show that when you are exiled, your home is other people: our identity is the people we love and live with. In this sense, the main character reinvents himself in his relationship with Noémie through his encounter with Serge. These two characters open his eyes and the spectrum of possibilities. At the end, he agrees to be part of a family – outside the norm.

Why did you want to follow your protagonist for so long? For the whole decade?
For me, exile is a matter of duration, and to tell the story, I needed this novelistic breadth. I wanted to see how time marked him in this experience. There is a phrase that sums up the film and its treatment of time: “The days are endless, and the years fly by.”

At one point, he doesn’t belong anywhere any more. Not to his old country and certainly not to the new one. There is something very tragic about such a realisation, but so many experience it.
It’s an important subject for me because I have lived through the experience of exile – ever since I left Morocco with my friends and my mother at the age of 11. Now, it’s something fundamental: part of my identity and even my character. For me, exile crystallises when you reach the end of your fantasies about departure and return. Because you never feel at home, and when you return, you are no longer at home either and you feel a kind of betrayal. All that’s left is to build a new life.

Why are music and dance such a massive part of the story? You really leave space for it.
Raï music [a form of Algerian folk music that dates back to the 1920s] was one of the main driving forces behind this project. And since it enjoyed its golden age in Marseille in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was important for me to anchor this music – and the city of Marseille – in the present and daily lives of my characters. Raï went into exile in France, and even “reinvented” itself through exile. Many of the songs deal with these themes very directly. There is a powerful balance between melancholy, in love or homesickness, and an intense desire for life, celebration and dance. Generally speaking, when you are in exile, your relationship with the music of your origins is often very strong, archaic and very powerful at the same time. When I was writing the film, raï was both an ally and a compass, allowing me to strike the right balance between the social and the melodramatic. Just like melodrama, it has the ability to speak about things in an intimate, lyrical way.

By the end, someone says: “At least we had some good times.” Was it important for you to underline this and find joy despite everything that’s going on?
One of the film’s major inspirations was Sentimental Education [by Gustave Flaubert]. It’s a phrase borrowed directly from the novel, when Frédéric sees his old friend Deslauriers, and they reminisce about the past. It’s a very important reference in the film, as my aim was not to treat these journeys solely from a social and sociological point of view. I wanted to give them an intimate dimension. For me, this lends a singularity to the characters – their concerns are actually very common. It takes them away from these stereotypes of what a “migrant” is and makes them more human.