Film review: The Invader
There are so many ways Nicolas Provost’s debut feature film could have gone wrong, and it’s a testament to his highly stylised, delicately crafted manner of working that it doesn’t.
Playing with your expectations
In The Invader, which opens this week across Brussels and Flanders, Amadou is truly a specimen to behold. He is washed up on an unnamed European shore with many African comrades, who have mostly drowned. We see him next in Brussels, where he is doing the work of two men so that his seriously ill friend is not thrown out of the thug-controlled warehouse-cum- flophouse that is home to illegal immigrants. His muscles bulge as sweat drips from his brow.
Eventually things go very wrong with the situation, but Amadou – despite his vulnerable position – doesn’t take any guff. You’re left staring in wonder – and with not a little admiration – at his reckless bravery.
Good looks and an unbridled confidence get Amadou (Issaka Sawadogo, pictured) further in this marginal life than you’d think, and he meets the beautiful, successful business woman Agnès (Stefania Rocca). She is drawn in by this seemingly exotic extra-marital adventure. But as she begins to see through his transparent lies about who he is, that temper Amadou displayed to such cheers early on becomes more and more sinister. Eventually, you just don’t know if Amadou is a good guy, or a bad guy.
Provost was born in West Flanders, spent several years in Oslo and today lives and works in Brussels. His 2004 short Exoticore also starred Issaka Sawadogo, as an immigrant in Norway, and he wrote this film with the actor in mind. “I wanted to say something about the climate of the world today, and I didn’t have to look very far,” he tells me. “I put him in an immigration setting and challenged myself not to make a sentimental political work. I thought it was more courageous to have an African man as a true cinema anti-hero instead of it being about yet another one-dimensional, suffering character.”
The Invader has a similar feel to much of Provost’s shorter works. Light is often very bright or very dim, and the neon lights of the city contrast sharply with human vulnerability. Occasionally, it’s almost like these are hapless characters in a video game. “I try to achieve a sort of poetic superficiality without adding anything myself,” explains Provost. “I never use extra light. I film the reality like it is, but I look for places or situations that are dreamlike. A good film to me is like the experience of a dream.”
Provost uses long takes to build up an almost unbearable tension – which is often no more than a tease. “People have a natural instinct to expect the worst to happen at any minute. We know what people are capable of doing to each other, and we also fight out own demons. I like to play with the expectations of the viewer.”
www.tinyurl.com/theinvader
About the author
Lisa Bradshaw is the editor-in-chief of Flanders Today. She worked as an editor and journalist in her homeland, the United States, before moving to the awesome city of Ghent in 2004. If she’s not in the office, she’s probably at a film festival.
