EUGÈNE GABANA LE PÉTROLIER

This portrait of a twenty-year-old Burkinabe could have been called L’Argent or To Have or Have Not: Eugène, an accountancy student at Ouagadougou high school, devotes all of his free time to the art of getting by, be it by borrowing his brother’s motorbike or convincing a potential buyer of the value of a cell phone mysteriously lacking a charger. After Camille Plagnet’s The Hectic Life of a Dismissed Worker (2009), the filmmakers follow suit with this picaresque hero whose endurance compensates for his small height and spinal disability. Like in a classic gangster film, puny Eugène attaches the utmost importance to his image both in front of the camera and with his gang of friends. “He behaved like he’d lost his job!” he says of one of his unlucky fellow womanizers. With no prospects (work, marriage), posture and smooth talk make the man. Advancing in blocks that mimic the long driftings of the biking “Pétrolier”, the film nonetheless is more than the account of petty trafficking against a backdrop of cavernous poverty. The cell phone, at first no more than a tradable object, reveals the teenager’s inner world when we see him on his straw mattress interminably chatting to a possible female conquest, more convincingly than with a customer. “My eldest brother is an ambassador in Canada…” (Charlotte Garson)