Roger Joly is a very successful salesperson at a prestigious automobile showroom. He's married to a beautiful wife, has three adorable kids and takes his family for vacation every week. A fine life like this made everyone admire him for what he was - perfect husband, honourable man, sincere and dedicated to his job and oh yes, everything french.
Turning point. His car gets stopped by police, since he forgot to wear his seat-belt. He gets ticketed, apologises and goes home as usual. Nothing unusual. But the police who now have him in their records are unable to find any trace of his identity, anywhere. They start to get doubts.. Does Roger Joly really exist? Or is there something wrong? How was this man's details never to be found anywhere in any goverment database? A lawyer is called in and he begins to investigate...
Roger did in fact exist for 17 years. Before that he was Aziz Bensala, a young lad who lived in Tunisia, came to marseilles, fell in love with france and its people, its language and its culture.. He had decided to remain in France and start a new life... And he had found bliss in France.. Until the day everything went to pieces.. Roger refuses to submit himself to the truth. With every evidence against him, the court declares that Roger Joly was in fact Aziz Bensala. A judge sentences him to five years in prison for usurpation of identity, forgery and use of forgeries and swindling. So Roger hangs himself that very night with the bed sheets of his prison cell. It’s not the prison sentence that broke Aziz’s spirit. He was no stranger to prison. But this time, the court had rummaged through the life of this Roger he claimed to be. Piece by piece, the judge had analyzed the puzzle in minute detail, exposed the fraud and delivered his conclusions: Roger Joly was a fiction. The man was sent back to the illegal immigrant he didn’t want to be; to this Aziz Bensala, born near Gabès, Tunisia, who went to school barefoot and had a wretched childhood; who had arrived in Marseilles in the mid-70s, after his brother, to find work that didn’t exist back home; who wanted to become part of a country, a culture he admired, to the point of inventing a new identity.
What strikes me most is the fact how much a person can fall in love with a culture.. He raises his children till his death feeding them with the same passion and love for the country.. But still the idea seems far fetched and except for Daniel Russo, as Mr.Joly a.k.a Aziz, there is nothing but the script that carries you along.
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