MovieChat Forums > Samba (2014) Discussion > Moving movie, bad ending - spoiler

Moving movie, bad ending - spoiler

posted 9 years ago by Hut_Syndrom
1 reply | jump to latest

Beautiful acting, great characters and moving love story.
However the anti racist message of this movie contradict the fact that a love story between a white woman and a black African man is probably still such a taboo in the French cinema that it has to be justified by using the immigration story as a back bone.
In my opinion, the relationship could have developed much more basing only on the cultural differences.
I felt that we didn't get enough of the live story but on the contrary not enough about the immigration either. The lack of these two, concluded into what I find as a quite confusing ending that rather simplifying things than really solve them.
The movie show more than a glimpse about immigration in France, but avoid dealing with hard questions and rather to draw a reality where everybody are victims and France authorities are a modern Gestapo.

However the movie mange to make you forget about all these until the last 10 minutes where the director decided to wrap everything is solved but not explained.

Samba has 10 years staying visa, but he cannot have passport. Since once he will go to make one, the lack of other documents will probably reveal the fact he lives with a dead a mans identity. Therefore, he is still a prisoner but in France. What he suppose to do after 10 years? Jonas doesn't have relatives or friends? He was lonely in the world and even the ngo who worked on his case will not know that Samba imposes as Jonas?
Why his uncle is on the run? Alice is now happy and wears Sambas T shirt but is not with him. Is it because she got over her problems and moved on as Samba's uncle sId or she is happy because she can be with him? which doesn't explain the last shot of Samba walking alone.
Where is Wilson/Walid?

Too many loose ends that hurt the movie at the end.
And it's a shame because it is a great performance of Omar Sy.

[–] PoppyTransfusion 8 years ago

Some interesting points. Agree about Samba being a prisoner. He may of course marry, Alice perhaps, and then seek to make himself legal in that way either as Samba or as Jonas. I think his uncle had had enough and decided to return after Samba's brush with death. Wilson/Walid and his absence at the end is, I think, a good example of the fragmented and lives of flux in the illegal migrant populations.

Alice is now happy and wears Sambas T shirt but is not with him. Is it because she got over her problems and moved on as Samba's uncle sId or she is happy because she can be with him? which doesn't explain the last shot of Samba walking alone.

There was no confusion for me in this. Alice and Samba are together, which is why she is wearing his lucky shirt. He is leaving the Gendarmerie where he now works, as an impostor and illegal migrant and it is deeply ironic. Yet he can come and go from there as a free man and he caresses the horse as he passes thinking of Alice but without her need for the horse.

In the midst of winter I found there was, within me, an invincible summer