Grigris runs into a few issues in its third act, as the story seems to run out of steam. Also, its two leads remain pretty undeveloped throughout.
But I want to get those criticisms out of the way so that I can share what really works well. The film opens on its greatest asset, which is the dancer (Souleymane Démé) director Mahamet-Saleh Haroun apparently encountered one day and was so impressed that he began to spin a film script around him.
It is hard to describe the way Démé dances. He throws his thin body into loops of explosive movement, fire, and humor that incorporate his withered left leg. Démé dances throughout the film, sometimes for audiences and sometimes just for us. In one of these intimate moments, Démé finally bares his disabled leg for us as he weaves it into a nocturnal ballet.
We learn quickly through his dancing that Grigris is about useless and discarded things made useful and beautiful. Grigris struggles to find work after losing his photography business. His lame leg makes this tough. But he finds new life in Mimi, the prostitute that becomes his lover and refuge. If this sounds a bit generic, it really is. There is some intrigue involving Grigris’ sojourn in the gasoline smuggling business that moves the second act of the film along. Interactions between Grigris and Mimi are poignant at first. And any time Grisgris gets time on the dance floor, Haroun’s steady camera conjures something almost on par with Carax and Lavant or Luhrmann and Paul Mercurio. The film would have been better serviced watching him for longer and letting the story build around those sequences.
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One of the best scenes I have seen in cinema this year comes toward the end of the film, Démé dancing with immense emotion in the top half of a dark frame. It is a good reminder of how cinema watches people sharing the material weight of their anxieties with us, Démé physically narrating the hoped-for release from the cruelties he has encountered. It is incredible to watch him momentarily reject the idea that his withered leg is a liability, totally at ease with himself – though we then track with him, and his painful looking limp, through the rest of the film. Even given my criticisms, this is well worth catching.
And you can now, via Film Movement and other VOD outlets.
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