Broad Green Pictures Place “Samba” in Detention; TIFF Proving Fruitful for New Distrib

They’ve yet to sink their teeth into the complexities of the game, but Broad Green Pictures (going by the acronym of BGP) are in full swing mode. Building their future slate, after lassoing Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes (we publish our TIFF review tomorrow), the distrib have picked up Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano’s Samba and have pegged it with a second-half of 2015 release.

Gist: Samba, a Senegalese man (Omar Sy) who’s been living in Paris for ten years, gets by doing odd jobs. Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is a high-level business woman suffering a burnout. He’s been doing every thing he can to get his French identity papers, while she’s trying to pull herself together by doing volunteer work for an immigrant association. Both are trying to find a way out of the impasse their lives are in, until the day that their paths cross.

Worth Noting: Call it a mutual, creative, beneficiary relationship, actor Omar Sy and writing-directing team of Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano experienced one of those career-defining, game-changing moments with how The Intouchables played out internationally and domestically (in France).

Do We Care?: We found their last film to be of the manipulative sort and here it just appears to be a rehash of the odd-pairings formula, replacing the immigrant worker and disabled tag-team, by the immigrant and social worker. We’re curious in seeing the light-hearted acting approach in Gainsbourg and Tahar Rahim, but are bracing for more mushy, crowd-pleasing denouement.