Indomitable: Thomas Ngijol changes style and gear (critic)

In front of and behind the camera, he seriously camps a Cameroonian commissioner with expeditious methods. A strong, moving and amazing drama.

The second film made solo by Thomas Ngijol after Fastlife is the fictional adaptation of a document made in 1995 by Mosco Levi Boucault, A crime in Abidjan. We followed in the Ivorian megalopolis a criminal investigation conducted by Commissioner Kouassi with violent methods (confessions by torture …) and the drift of a youth ravaged by drugs. In addition to what was played in front of his camera, it was the diving in the heart of the electricity of a city that was staggering. Levi Boucault will reproduce the exercise in Philadelphia and Roubaix where Desplechin will draw his “light” there. Ngijol therefore goes on traces already tracked, in a world transposed here in Yaoundé in Cameroon but whose overflows of life and death form the same chaos. He himself takes charge of the embodiment of the (anti-) hero to which he added an intimate dimension. In the investigation and its ravages, Ngijol intends above all to paint a portrait of an equally abrasive father in his relationship to his children. We discover him thus moralizing his young son to whom he likes to recall that Marvin Gaye was killed by his sire. Violence is not experienced by the person concerned as the vector of a distancing but the catalyst capable of preventing concealment and therefore installing confidence in understanding. This a priori unbearable brutality, neither the filmmaker nor the actor seeks to get around it or kiss him. She is there, in the air of a film always at a good distance from her subject. Mosco Levi Boucault spoke of a film ” Who burns because we don’t know where he’s going … We feel this same glow at work here.

By Thomas Ngijol. With Thomas Ngijol, Danilo Melande, welcome Roland Mvoe … Duration 1h21. Release on June 11, 2025