Eden à l'Ouest

The main character isn't only innocent and naive, but he also is portrayed as good natured as it gets. Now you could argue if that really is possible or if it really works story-wise. But you have to suspend your disbelief here early on. The movie is jumping from one scene to the next, changing many locations and therefor never really builds an emotional connection with the viewer. While the segments are nice and good, the whole experience isn't as good as the sum of it's parts.

It gets even more irritating, when almost every cliché get's played out in the story, letting the main character go through every possible roller-coaster ride an (illegal) immigrant can go through. Unfortunately it doesn't mix as well as one might think (pace and rhythm is all over the place and not in a good sense).

This is just the silliest movie ever made! The adventures of the illegal migrant are all so implausible and unreal. The main character stumbles through the movie like a mute, getting into all sorts of scrapes and sexual trysts. He spends a lot of time nude and uses sex to find a way out of everything. Oddly enough, he never gets a sexually transmitted disease despite having constant sex with random strangers. Most of the time, he plays the role like a 1920s silent movie star, and it wears thin because of the repetitiveness. Overall, it's just garbage and is a waste of time to watch, unless you are into nudity.

This tale of illegal migrants is masterfully told as a straight story of events along the road to Paris. In order to illustrate many facets of the illegal immigrant saga, the writers have gone out of their way to include many more events, mishaps, and adventures that could credibly happen to a single migrant. Some people may object to this, but it serves to make this a more universal picture of events that can overtake an exile.

The emphasis of the story-telling is not a political or social statement, it's a strikingly enjoyable film with excellent cinematography which nevertheless manages to raise many serious issues. It's a story of human adaptation to loss of home and lack of normal human contact.

The protagonist says little because he can hardly speak French or English. Language throughout the film is not very important as a result. The audience, like migrants themselves, sits through episodes in Arabic, Greek, French, German, and English.

Along this rootless journey, he strikes up relationships ambiguous relationships along the road, mainly warm and yet fleeting - particularly the toy-boy episode at the start. There are many little subtle moments in the film, each making powerful comments about human moral choices under duress.

Combining suspense, drama, and subtly thought provoking episodes, this is another lasting film from Costa Gavras.

Elias, a young man of indefinite origin is one of the passengers of a rickety boat taking illegal immigrants to Europe. As a Coast Guard cutter approaches, all ditch their documents in the ocean and Elias tries to escape swimming. What follows is a sort of comedic Odyssey. He alights on an island that hosts de luxe tourists and befriends a magician that claims to work in the Lido of Paris and tells Elias to look him up if and when he gets to Paris. From then on, Paris is Elias' mythical objective. He manages to reach the European mainland and proceeds in his journey helped only by his wits, his good looks and his ability to run at dizzying speeds from the police. He has an indestructible good nature, and is helped by some strangers and exploited by others. His journey takes unexpected twists and turns, some very funny, and there is a sort of resolution at the end, perhaps only in Elias' mind.

This being a Costa-Gavras film, we expect (and get) some cutting social comment. The Eden of Paris is not the romantic city of tourist brochures. Squads of police in vans are everywhere, deploy in a few seconds and harass bystanders and passersby on the basis of their skin color or their dress. Jobs, if available, are transitory, exploitative and take advantage of immigrants being unable to seek legal help. And, good samaritans beware: a monstrous French law threatens up to five years in jail and/or a fine of 30,000 euros for "assisting an illegal immigrant". Paris stands out as symbol of Europe, the self appointed Cradle of Western Civilization facing a wave of immigration whose desperate last-chance character is a direct consequence of Europe's centuries long predatory practices and constant warmongering in Africa and elsewhere, the bombing and destruction of Libya as a functioning country being a textbook example,

There have been many recent movies on the plight of illegal immigrants in Europe. Perhaps this one is not up to the best in the genre, and perhaps it is not up to the best in Costa-Gavras filmography, but its comedic and dramatic components mesh well and make a harmonious whole well worth watching.

Greek-born, long-time Paris resident filmmaker Costa-Gavras (of the classic political thriller Z) had grand ambitions in making Eden Is West/Eden à l'ouest. He engaged veteran playwright and screenwriter Jean-Claude Grumberg to write the dialogue. He also recruited Italian heartthrob Ricardo Scamarcio, charismatic and appealing as Elias, the mostly silent, Chaplinesque, yet gorgeous lead character, an illegal of no specific nationality (when he briefly speaks his own tongue, it's a made-up language) aiming through thick and thin to get to Paris. A very modern story meant to engage universal sympathies was the aim.

But in the event, Elias' adventures seem little more than a motley series of improvisations, some lurid, some hairy, some comical, unable to form into anything lastingly memorable, touching, or meaningful. Scamarcio shows himself an excellent mime and is sympathetic throughout. Elias is a chameleon whose ability to insert himself into almost every situation he enters borders on the fantastic. When he talks about the film, Costa-Gavras mentions globalization, the exploitation of immigrants, world poverty, the wanderings of Ulysses. But 'Eden Is West' winds up being mostly just the picaresque tale of a young charmer, attractive to men and women, trusted by all, endlessly resilient, surviving on minimal sleep and a diet of hastily grabbed croissants and gulps of coffee, shedding garments and identities with equal alacrity. And that's all very well, but so what? If this is 'Candide,' it's 'Candide' without the enlightenment or the political savvy.

Elias' adventures begin when he jumps off a boat full of illegals as the coast guard approaches, and is one of several young men who lands, alive, on a posh island resort called "Eden" that has nude bathing as one of its entertainments. The film holds our attention and sets the theme: Elias is always in danger of getting found out and hauled away. We hold our breath as he runs just ahead of the cops or security. Awekening the next morning on the island, he strips naked to fit in, turns into a bellboy by donning an "Eden" jacket, get kissed by a gay hotel host, is forced to repair a jammed toilet by an Israeli, and is adopted as a bed-mate by horny German widow Christina (Juliane Koehler) during a spectacular rainstorm. This resort sequence is slickly done, more extended and more emotionally engaging than the precipitous road picture that soon follows. But it also reads as a segment out of a soft-core B picture: in terms of setting tone and focus, it gets things off to an unpromising start. Things are too easy and too random. The first twenty minutes show the flaws of the whole 110-minute film. Costa-Gavras is adept at convincingly establishing his kaleidoscopic sequence of milieus. But not so good at making a logical arc of the adventures.

Elias' ability to fall easily into any role leads him to serve not only as a hotel underling and as Christina's lover, but also as the assistant of the Eden resort's German resident magician, Nick Nickelby (Ulrich Tukur). Later he escapes the resort and finds himself working for a traveling vendor, recruited at a clandestine electronics recycling factory, and donning various disguises to evade the cops. He's a fugitive, cut-rate Felix Krull manqué, and there's the suspicion from the start that all these things are temptations the delay this Ulysses from finding his Ithaka--which may be the Paris nightclub where Nick Nicholby tells him he usually works. Nickelby says, "If you come to Paris, come and see me," and through his travels, Elis keeps struggling to get this sentence in French memorized, and to make it to the Paris nightclub and the magician. Nobody knows his language, and his hold on French is shaky; hence the value of Scamarcio's expressive mouth and big, soulful eyes.

It's hard to see what the point is of the rich, squabbling Greek couple (Ieroklis Mihailidis and Annie Loulou) or the gang of gypsies who at first think him one of theirs, or the louche pair of German truckers (Antoine Monot, Florian Martens) who leave him off at a crossroads between the routes to Hamburg and to Paris. More adventures and narrow escapes follow, and Elias does eventually make it to the City of Light and find the magician.

Apparently Costa-Gavras meant to keep his treatment of an illegal's travails on the way to gainful employment in the European Union lighthearted, but the various episodes just aren't memorable or meaningful enough. This is a great role for Ricardo Scamarcio, or might have been; unfortunately the project seems too ill conceived to have lasting value.

Eden à l'ouest opened in Paris February 11, 2009 to mediocre reviews. It was shown as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, March 2009. 110 minutes.