TIFF 2011: THE INVADER Review

Though you may not expect a white Belgian director to share much in common with early 1990's American hip hop, it would appear that writer-director Nicolas Provost has an intimate understanding of white Europe's Fear Of A Black Planet. But while Public Enemy's seminal 1990 album was a angry outburst against racial prejudice Provost's debut feature is more of a somber mediation on the subject, a quietly mournful acknowledgement that the cycles of poverty and prejudice are as strong now as they ever were.

Provost begins in shocking fashion, the camera locked in close on a beautiful woman lying naked on a nameless beach. Responding to some off-screen commotion she rises and strides across the sand, eventually arriving at a place where a pair of black men - one of them the powerfully built Amadou (Issaka Sawadogo) - have literally washed ashore. They lock eyes - she with simple curiosity, he with the intensity of someone who has just won an impossible struggle to stay alive.

We jump forward then, both in time and space, and find Amadou hard at work on a construction site in Brussels. He's even more powerfully built than we may have first seen, and gifted with both obvious intelligence and charisma. He is also in the country illegally, completely under the thumb of a local mobster who houses illegal migrants in the bottom of a parking garage, essentially using them as debt slaves as he forces them to pay down the cost of promised illegal papers that will most likely never arrive. And Amadou has to pay this debt down twice, carrying as he is the load for the friend he washed ashore with - a friend who is now deathly ill but cannot seek out medical help for fear of deportation.

Though unhappy Amadou is willing to play his part as long as his friend is safe and sheltered. But when he disappears and Amadou's questions as to his whereabouts are met with scorn then he lashes out with anger and strikes out on his own, quickly fixating on a wealthy white businesswoman who thinks may provide the keys to his freedom.

Both title and opening sequence make it very clear that The Invader is intended as provocation, a sharply barbed piece of satire ripping a hole out of white fears that the black man will wash up from Africa and steal our women. And it certainly is that, though Provost proves too smart by far to simply retreat into anger and violence. Both are present, yes, but the film has layers that run far deeper than that. It is a sad meditation on futility, a reflection on the situation of a man coming to realize that he simply has no way out. That despite his gifts and abilities he will never be treated as an equal. It is a reflection on how a man's morals will shift when they come to realize such a thing, about how the will to survive can lead a man to abandon dignity and civility when it becomes clear that neither is going to put food in his belly or a pillow under his head.

Anchored by a magnetic performance from Sawadogo - who is at the center of literally every scene in the film - The Invader is a bold yet subtle debut from Provost, a sure sign that the wave of young talent coming from Belgium is not over yet.