ILLEGAL
Written & Directed by Olivier Masset-Depasse
Produced by Jacques-Henri and Olivier Bronckart
Released by Film Movement
French & Russian with English subtitles
Belgium/Luxembourg/France. 95 min. Not Rated
With Anne Coesens, Esse Lawson, Gabriela Perez, Alexandre Gontcharov, Christelle Cornil, Olga Zhdanova & Tomasz Bialkowski
 

From the first frame of this tense psychological thriller, the protagonist, a Russian émigré, Tania, is almost pathological in how she protects her teenage son Ivan. So, of course, she’s going to sacrifice herself for him when the Belgian police discover she has no identification papers—she gets into a skirmish with the officers, allowing Ivan to escape their clutches on foot while she’s seized and then thrown into a detention center.

After this sequence, Illegal becomes a harrowing journey for a woman with few options. She refuses to divulge her name in the vain hope that that will slow down the bureaucratic machinery against her. Through a hard-earned telephone calling card, she keeps tabs on Ivan, now living with her best friend and—to Tania’s eternal regret—working for a neighborhood thug from the old country. She attempts, somewhat pathetically, to escape from the facility after being told that she may get jail time for using forged papers. Although she has almost no chance to elude the guards (she's caught almost immediately), her maternal instincts take over, and perhaps thinking she might not see her son again if she ends up in jail, she bolts for freedom.

In his obviously heartfelt and intelligently articulated plea for justice, director Olivier Masset-Depasse has said that nothing has been made up in his film. Everything that happens to Tania has been documented in his research, and what might have been merely an overheated prison melodrama instead gains in intensity and immediacy by matter-of-factly showing the uses and abuses of a system that's been designed for incarceration and deportation, not empathy.

Masset-Depasse zeroes in on Tania (a devastating performance by Anne Coesens) by, as it were, invading her privacy with prying close-ups, as well as throwing curveballs at her from all sides. In her precarious situation, she's always on her guard, whether dealing with the thug, to whom she owes rent, or reminding Ivan (a convincing Alexandre Gontcharov) to speak French while riding on the bus so he doesn't stand out.

Illegal works best as a cautionary tale on how desperate people who have left dangerous homelands will do anything to stay in the West and not be sent back to, say, Russia. In case viewers miss that point, a subplot involving Tania's fellow inmate, an African immigrant who ensures Tania how she will never be forcibly deported, plays out more obviously than is necessary. Still, Masset-Depasse usually makes his points more realistically, such as the superbly directed sequence on board the plane that's sending Tania back to her home country. Screaming for help, she enlists the aid of fellow passengers and their trusty cell phones, which take photographic evidence of ruthless government intervention that makes the evening news. Illegal isn’t simply an anti-government tract, however. For each corrupt official or police officer, there’s someone who genuinely wants to assist Tania, namely a sympathetic detention center guard, who tells her how to work the prison system while being detained.

Paced with the crackling urgency of a thriller and packed with authentic acting down to the tiniest bit parts, Illegal ends with a reunion that, after so much physical and emotional debasement, is less a happy ending than a needed catharsis for Tania and the audience. Kevin Filipski
April 4, 2011