The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir

A film that begins in India. Aja lives in Mumbai. He performs in the street; he does tricks as a fake fakir and collects money. His mother dies. She leaves a letter. There is a father in the letter. The man is in France. Aja goes to Paris. He has one forged banknote. His object is to buy a bed of nails from a store. He meets a woman at the store. Marie is American and they promise each other a meeting. Having no money, Aja stays in the shop. He sleeps inside a wardrobe. In the morning the wardrobe is loaded onto a lorry. From there the film is a chain of accidents. The lorry goes to England. Then a container. Then an aircraft. Then Libya, Italy and Spain. He meets someone everywhere. Sudanese migrants, an actress, a taxi driver, a customs officer. He has no papers. He finds a way across each border every time, and every time through someone else's help. What the narrative is interested in is not a journey but a document: its idea is that the only difference between tourists who cross the same routes legally and people who cannot is a piece of paper. The narrative gives this inside a comic frame. The tone is light and the humour plentiful. That choice is contested. The line of the Sudanese migrants is genuinely heavy and the narrative moves over it fast. Aja is a storyteller. He writes his own story along the way and the narrative uses that as a frame. The source is Romain Puértolas's novel. It is a French and Indian co-production; the dialogue is in several languages. Ken Scott directed. Dhanush, Bérénice Bejo, Erin Moriarty, Barkhad Abdi and Gérard Jugnot are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes light adventure comedy and multi-country road narratives. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the subject to be taken seriously; migration is used as a device and the narrative never stops to think.