Welcome attracted over 1 million admissions in France in 2009 and was also successful in Italy for writer-director Philippe Lioret. It received won awards at festivals and prizes at competitions around Europe. However, in the UK, where part of the story is set, interest was negligible with only a few thousand admissions. Perhaps this was because the small distributor Cinefile had difficulty getting bookings – but was this in turn because of a reluctance to deal with narratives like this? The ‘Welcome’ of the title is deeply ironic and refers to the (presumably British?) doormat in a block of flats/apartments in Calais where the common greeting extended towards migrants attempting to reach the UK by crossing the Channel is anything but ‘welcoming’.
The narrative concerns two couples. Marion (Audrey Dana) and Simon (Vincent Lindon) are a French couple living in Calais. She is a teacher and an activist helping to run a support centre for asylum seekers. He is an ex-swimming champion now working as an instructor at a local pool. Their marriage has broken up, partly because he doesn’t share his wife’s commitment to helping asylum seekers. The other couple are also separated. Bilal (Firat Ayverdi) is a young Iraqi Kurd (17-18) trapped in Calais while his girlfriend Mina (Derya Ayverdi) is now living with her family in London where her father is a restaurant manager. Bilal makes one abortive (and traumatic) attempt to get to England using a people-smuggling gang and then seeks another way. He is a strong athlete who wants to become a professional footballer but now decides to attempt to swim the channel. Searching for a trainer to help him prepare he comes across Simon. Reluctant at first, Simon gradually takes to the boy and realises that by helping him he might have a chance of getting back with his wife. (Simon and Bilal communicate in English – the lingua franca of migrants in Europe.) This unlikely story is apparently based on something Lioret heard about in Calais and his meeting with a young man like Bilal when he spent time living with migrants and supporters. (See this interview with Philippe Lioret.)
Without these two love stories I wouldn’t have had a movie but a documentary about immigrants. I’ve seen many of these documentaries – and they have all been very good – but unfortunately I don’t think people are necessarily moved by them. If people are interested in my film, it’s because it speaks to them emotionally. (Philippe Lioret in the interview above.)
What Lioret says makes sense and I thought the film worked very well. I don’t want to spoil the storytelling by revealing the ending but I did find the central idea difficult. Swimming the Channel is challenging for the most experienced swimmers with full support and seemingly impossible to achieve ‘under cover’. Is this attempt meant to be ‘real’ or symbolic in terms of storytelling? While we are concerned that Bilal might undertake the journey, we are also made aware of the French law (L622-1) that makes it an offence to help illegal immigrants in France. Marion and her co-workers have to work carefully in relation to this law. Simon is more cavalier and risks imprisonment because of the way he acts.
Overall I think the film works in terms of the writing and performances, although I think it is sometimes difficult to have a well-known actor like Lindon alongside much less experienced young actors like Ayverdi. It works in terms of ‘trainer’ and ‘trainee’ but in other scenes it is difficult not to look at Lindon’s performance differently. (As I write this, Lindon’s performance in 2015’s The Measure of a Man which won the Cannes Acting Prize is being lauded on the film’s UK release.) I’m also now conscious of spotting actors like Thierry Godard, prominent in the TV cop show Engrenages shown on BBC4.
The subject matter of the film is now arguably even more compelling since the camp, ‘The Jungle’, in Calais is still there even though its profile in the UK news media is being eclipsed by the tragedy of migrant flows across the Mediterranean and by the furore about immigration deliberately inflamed by the ‘Leave’ campaign in the UK European Referendum. If this kind of story was to appear in the UK it would most likely be in the form of a documentary, possibly for television. The equivalent of a production like Welcome has not, as far as I can remember, happened in the UK since a trio of films by ‘name’ directors in the 2000s. Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (UK 2000), Michael Winterbottom’s In This World (UK 2002) and Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts (UK 2006). Any one of these would make a good choice for a comparative study with Welcome. It’s also worth noting that it took another French director, Rachid Bouchareb to make a film about the personal stories associated with an international tragedy in London River (France-Algeria 2009), which deals with the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in London.
Philippe Lioret’s film perhaps focuses on the French couple too much for audiences whose first concern is the fate of the migrants. But the fate of both couples is important. Migrants, whether they are asylum seekers or simply ambitious people wanting the chance for what they perceive as a better life are not necessarily ‘victims’ or ‘heroes’ and those who attempt to help them do so for a range of reasons. The point of a humanist film is to represent all the characters in a story as who they are rather than as characters with specific narrative roles. Welcome is a film well worth seeing in the contemporary climate and it’s still available on DVD.
The Case for Global Film 