Samba, film review: Predictable plotting but this romantic comedy has heart and charm

(15) Eric Toledano, Olivier Nakache, 118 mins. Starring: Omar Sy, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Tahar Rahim

Omar Sy and Charlotte Gainsbourg star in ‘Samba’

With its brutal cops and undocumented immigrant workers trying to keep out of the authorities' way, Samba could easily have been made as a grim social-realist fable.

Instead, the film-makers Eric Toledo and Olivier Nakache (the team behind 2011's runaway box-office hit Untouchable) make the film as a gentle romantic comedy. The main character Samba (Omar Sy) is a Senegalese dishwasher threatened with deportation. Charlotte Gainsbourg is the high-flying businesswoman who has had a burnout and who volunteers at the local immigration centre during her recovery.

The plotting is predictable but the film has heart and charm all the same. Sy plays Samba with a sense of wounded innocence, as a decent man who can't understand how bureaucracy can be so cruel. Tahar Rahim is appealing in an artful-dodger sort of way as an Algerian immigrant who pretends to be Brazilian because he thinks it will give him better luck with girls and jobs.