“We clung to her shining light.” This line, taken from a spare narration by Ernest (Ahmed Sylla), the youngest son of Rose (Annabelle Lengronne), captures the essence of this beguiling but frustrating family drama. He’s talking about his fearless, fiercely charismatic mother, who in 1989 flees Ivory Coast with her two young sons to start a new life in France.
Lengronne is magnificent and magnetic in the role. Reverently lit, so that her queenly profile is the only thing we notice whenever she’s in the shot, she is imperiously in control of her own needs and her own pleasure. “I choose my men myself,” she says firmly to a matchmaking auntie.
