Quebecois writer-director Frédérick Pelletier's Diego Star observes several pivotal days in the life of Traore (Issaka Sawadogo), an African laborer assigned as the second engineer on the titular seafaring vessel. When a mechanical crisis transpires on board, Traore and others shoulder the blame, even though it's clearly the fault of corrupt, skinflint ship proprietors unwilling to take proper care of their boat. When external ship inspectors question the crew, everyone lies about the reasons belying the breakdown, except for Traore, who has the courage to stand-up and speak the truth. Meanwhile, with the craft waylaid near a working-class Quebec town, the sailors begin temporary home stays with residents of the area. Traore gets his residence with a young, single mother named Fanny (Chloe Bourgeois), forges a tenuous friendship with her, and even begins to care for her infant son during the day. But soon, Traore's willingness to call out his superiors costs him his job, spelling a rocky and uncertain future. Indignant, he begins to beg the other sailors to corroborate his story, and can't quite bring himself to break the news about his termination to Fanny.
Overall, this film has the feel of a tight, clean, beautifully-executed short story, rich in character detail and nuanced behavioral observation. It has no declamatory themes to deliver, no great message with which to laden us. It is, instead, the ascetic and yet elegant look at a transitory relationship between two individuals whose paths intersect by virtue of sheer happenstance, and who might well never have otherwise met. The picture finds its greatest joy in its most quiet scenes, that observe the low-key interaction between Fanny and Traore. It's a relationship that, mercifully, defies convention by never lapsing into formulaic romance; as a result, their dynamic is fascinating to watch. Pelletier also introduces lovely moments of understated visual poetry in the apartment, as when he shows Fanny and Traore pausing to watch the flashing yellow lights of a snowplow, late at night, filtering through the apartment windows.
Sawadogo is ideally cast in the lead role. With his coal-black African skin worn and ragged from decades of labor, open face, scarred watery eyes, and sinewy muscles, the actor looks primal and mythical, like some magnificent core element dredged up from the bowels of the earth. And so too Traore's values seem Old Testament in their wholeness, their apparent incorruptibility. He transcends and redefines our sense of goodness in a character. But he's also far from flawless - he's blinded by naivete, never hip to the depth of the rot that surrounds him, and he keeps right on believing, until the end, in his ability to find some shred of righteousness in those with whom he pleads to take a stand alongside him. His idealism is his Achilles' heel, and turns him into the quintessential tragic hero.
Yet the internal transition here really belongs to Fanny. We can recognize her type immediately: working-class, weather-beaten, jaded from years of dealing with self-gratifying, mentally stunted, trailer-trash men. So cynical is she that experience has actually divested her of the ability to see palpable integrity when it materializes before her - even in someone as open-hearted as Traore. It takes external corroboration of his virtue (from a third-party observer on the ship) for her to grasp what she has lost, but when the veil is removed from her eyes, Traore is gone, and it's far too late to salvage what may well be the most meaningful friendship of her adult life. Therein lies the tragedy, and it's no small measure of Pelletier's storytelling skill that he exhibits her step forward in such a subtle, understated way, with one simple, telling close-up after she's informed of Traore's fate. We get neither an enormous melodramatic gesture, nor complete stasis, but rather, a dawning awareness on her face, that tells us everything we need to know about the degree to which she has evolved, and in what way. Another irony here is the fact that Traore has positively impacted another life, but may never learn this, for the geographic separation that lies between himself and Fanny is permanent; he believes incorrectly that his moral stand was all in vain, though we know otherwise.
There are unmistakable echoes of Saul Bellow in Diego Star's resigned, downbeat ending - particularly the author's seminal 1956 novella Seize the Day and Fiedler Cook's 1986 telemovie adaptation; Diego has the same compactness, and the same sense of immediate, anticlimactic sadness when the final credits roll. But at the same time, Traore is the opposite of Bellow's Tommy Wilhelm. Traore isn't a loser, nor is this story a meditation on personal failure. The denouement of Diego is highly deceptive; at first, you feel let down. But the more you think about the moral stand taken by the sailor, and the more you recognize the inexorable sleaziness of the human cesspool that surrounds him, the more his forced exile from this environment seems akin to both self-deliverance and exaltation. It's an inevitability - a great one - a triumphant one.
At first glance, this picture seems simple and straightforward, as well as easily ascertained, but all appearances to the contrary. Pelletier is a storyteller with a rare skill: like Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, he manages to hone in on working-class characters overlooked by other, lesser filmmakers, revel in the specificity of their life details and relationships, and somehow spin the internal and external shifts of their lives out into a story that carries the resonance of a wondrous new contemporary myth. As such, the film only grows deeper and more profound with repeat viewings and protracted reflection.