Last year, an unprecedented number of high profile movies about survival at sea appeared on our screens. All Is Lost, Captain Phillips, A Hijacking and Kon-Tiki together presented the ocean as a perilous zone for daredevils and jobsbodies alike, with land always the promised haven waiting at the end of an arduous journey. Diego Star, Frederick Pelletier’s debut fiction feature, flips the idea on its head; for Traore (lent soulful, muscular presence by Isaka Sawadogo), second engineer of a crumbling vessel named the Diego Star, the sea gives life. It’s where he makes a living for himself and his estranged family – only when he sets foot on land does his life begin to unravel.
It’s in wintry Canada that Traore begins his fight for survival (“Why do we break down in these shit countries? Why never Brazil, or the Caribbean?” complains his shipmate). With the failing Diego Star forced to dock in an ice-bound Quebecois port, Traore offers Canadian authorities the full story, one of company negligibility and corruption. Only his bosses successfully convince Traore’s fellow workers that keeping to the company line – that it was human error, with Traore’s team culpable – will see these overworked seamen paid their overdue wages. At odds with the higher-ups, and far from his African home, Traore faces punishment for supposedly doing the right thing.
In the manner of many great, lasting movies about corruption, you won’t want Diego Star to end the way it does. It joins the Chinatowns and the Parallax Views as a film unrelentingly cruel to its good protagonist in order to make its point about the right man vs. the system. Pelletier, at least, gives his lead some comfort in the form of a young single mother, Fanny, who acts as both surrogate wife and child to the stoic sailor. It’s this relationship that’s most interesting for the film – Fanny is initially sullen and immature, like a teenage daughter for Traore. As she warms to this modest, well-travelled man, the two form an almost instantaneous bond, perhaps induced by the fact that both have been without company from the opposite sex in a long time.
We know Traore has a wife and children back home, but his present situation as a prisoner of fate forces him to make a go of an imitation of family life for what he seems to suspect will be the last time. It’s why the normally mild-mannered figure becomes frustrated when Fanny brings a partner home after a drunken night out, slamming doors and shaming the girl into returning to her motherly duties. As Fanny, Chloé Bourgeois is perhaps a little too moodily one-note, but her relationship with Sawadogo’s Traore takes on an understated sweetness after they quietly bond and he helps with care of her child. Their pairing may make for only a simulation of a happy family, but it’s a convincing simulation, a necessary almost-romance to keep them warm through the literal and metaphorical winter.
Of course, it’s not to last. Pelletier’s film arrives at a finale that’s desperate and as chilly as cinematographer Philippe Roy’s matter-of-fact photography, providing the film with both its most agonizing moment and a key reason to keep an eye on this filmmaker. Because in a single, delicate jump cut, Pelletier snaps the ever-tightening string that is his social-realist narrative, and leaves us with one desolate scene full of unanswered questions and torment – a perfectly pessimistic ending. Socially, politically and emotionally switched-on, Diego Star is another one to add to your growing list of Quebecois films you want to see.
