We no longer need to introduce Roschdy Zem, an actor with an elegant charisma, a well-tempered profession and an eclectic career, an actor of said diversity with a high-flying career who, without having had either the desire or the need to deny himself, took care to open the hatches and to cultivate his art to the point of embodying one of the strongest presences of French cinema today.
The films he made announce the color: Bad faith (2006), Omar killed me (2011), Chocolate (2016)… Until these Mine who are his. This autobiographical film – what happens to the main character here happened to Roschdy Zem’s younger brother – installs us in an extended family.
Inaugural presentation in the form of a table, under the auspices of commensality and those annoying little family nothings that we only half say to ourselves, for fear of discovering the abyss that is lurking behind them. Moussa (Sami Bouajila), who is recovering very, very badly from the separation from his wife, hesitates to reveal to those close to him a situation that he fears to make irreversible by naming her. His sister Samia (Meriem Serbah), the only one in the know, supports him selflessly, devoted to an insane point. His brothers Salah (Rachid Bouchareb), Adil (Abel Jafri), Ryad (Roschdy Zem) are not indifferent but a little distant, each having made his life on his side.
Ryad dragged himself out of his family’s modest social background by becoming a television sports journalist and host of his own show. He is the one to whom we call in case of need, to whom we reproach in a low voice his delays and his frequent lack of response, and, through them, somewhere, the distancing from the rest of the family. As we can see, the autobiography does not stop at Roschdy Zem’s brother.
A realistic outline
A brutal accident will shake things up. Moussa, one night, falls, from the front, on his head. Coming out of the shock with an impressive frontal oedema, he sank into permanent drowsiness and, moreover, lost his sense of sociability. Unemployed, immersed in an almost vegetative existence, he begins to speak without any restraint to his entourage, telling everyone exactly what he thinks, which is perhaps not so far from the truth.
An extravagant comedy could come out of it, Roschdy Zem preferred a realistic outline, filmed in sequence shots coating a raw group, on the way in which this accident remobilizes a family solidarity which has distended over time.
But this somewhat too obvious idea which governs the film hides another, more secret one, which all the children of immigrants will detect, no doubt more quickly than the others: it is in the struggle for their survival that a family solidarizes, it is in comfort that it dissolves.