Recensioni de* critic*

Motifs are developed confidently, such as the careful treading of feet over the floor of a cramped home. A bold ellipsis skips ahead years into the future, anticipating an even bolder ending that breaks the protagonist away from our gaze mid-scene. Abdellah Taia fuses The Catcher in the Rye's anger with The 400 Blows' earnestness.

Mr. Taïa has written of his upbringing in a New York Times Op-Ed article that was far more vivid than anything in the film, which is hampered by unnecessary vagueness and drab composition. The cinematographer is Agnès Godard, whose collaborations with the director Claire Denis do wonders with light and gesture, tools that Mr. Taïa's film doesn't put to good use.

Salvation Army interrogates Abdellah's uneasy relationship with his own stereotyping as an Arab man—growing up means transitioning from a sex object to one, too, of postcolonial lust... If taciturn, Abdellah becomes all the more poignant for his tight-lippedness, the hardness of his stare—sad eyes registering every minute exchange between childhood repression and the agonies of adult freedom.

The way Taïa approaches his subject as if from an angle, granting us a glimpse of small but significant details, often focusing on specific expressions or extremities, is reminiscent at times of Robert Bresson—and the relation is just as often felt thematically, via Taïa's interest in internal transformation and his willingness to allow emotional if not narrative closure.

Literature is the genesis for both the film and for Abdellah's own trajectory of survival and escape, but the creation of meaning in Salvation Army is remarkably cinematic. It's in the way the story is told in brief fragments of unpredictable duration, in the simplicity of its sounds, and in the ingenious framing of visual elements, particularly in a scene when a young Abdellah literally disappears from view as he goes down on an older stranger at a beach resort.

Taïa does all of the little things right – the things that too often hamstring debut films. In the second act, the young adult Abdellah interacts with only three or four other characters, but each role is rounded and perfectly cast. A scene in which Abdellah shares a cigarette with a kind, genial stranger on a park bench would have been cut from most films, as it serves no specific narrative function, but here it's an unexpected reprieve and a simple opportunity to watch Abdellah smile.

Salvation Army avoids the usual pitfalls of political cinema, precisely because Taïa is able to remain focused on particulars, the overwhelming feel of things. (Agnès Godard's cinematography certainly helps in this regard.) But at the same time, Taïa makes sure that we see those specifics as nodes within objective historical formations, in which there are no enemies or smug tellers of truth, only people trying to make their best available move.