Gagarine

A sweet and sentimental story about immigrants being evicted from their dilapidated French apartment building that gets a little too dreamy for its own sake.

Sometimes you can just feel a movie you like pull away from you.

About halfway through “Gagarine,” I was all in. This sweet and sentimental story is about immigrants to France who are being evicted from their dilapidated old apartment building Paris. Named the Cité Gagarine, it was built by the French Communist Party and named after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who even showed up to dedicate its opening.

One resident, 16-year-old Youri (Alséni Bathily), is especially reluctant to go. A science whiz living on his own after being abandoned by his mother when she remarried, he’s been working feverishly to fix the building up to code to keep it from being condemned. Most resident long ago gave up, and Youri and his best friend, Houssam (Jamil McCraven), are very much like Don Quixote and Sancho, tilting at windmills for a lost cause.

Even after the decision comes down and everyone else leaves, Youri persists. He stays in the building and essentially becomes its ghost, knocking down walls and building a hidden sanctum where he’s increasingly isolated. It’s around here that the movie, from first-time feature film directors Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, began to lose me.

For a film rooted in real-life challenges like immigrants struggling to fit into Western society, interracial romance and daunting poverty, it’s an odd choice to have the last act essentially go into a flight of fancy. (Liatard and Trouilh wrote the screenplay with Benjamin Charbit).

Youri builds what looks like a space station inside the hollowed-out apartments, using nothing more than a few tools and the scraps he picks over from the building. He also starts to have dreams about going into space himself, interspersed with news footage of the international space station, and fancies that he will be able to use the building to launch himself into space and thereby escape his soul-crushing isolation.

I don’t mean to be the imagine grinch. I personally love it when movies take chances and go to unexpected places. But you’ve got to earn that journey so that when things suddenly launch in a wild direction, the audience is emotionally prepared to go with you.

And I wasn’t.

The heart of the movie is a budding romance between Youri and Diana (Lyna Khoudri), the strong-willed daughter of gypsies. One of the wonderful things about the movie is the colorful diaspora of peoples who have come to France from all over the world. They share a common language and circumstance, but retain their own stories, culture and fire.

Diana knows Morse code, and for a time communicates with Youri from his lone window in the dead building. Watching their lights flash across the distance as they slowly connect while apart is quite magical.

The filmmakers based this feature film on a short movie they made some years ago centered around the Cité Gagarine. When they heard it was going to be torn down in 2019, they had to hurry to produce this film using real locations and some actual people who lived there, which lends it an authentic weight.

Another important figure is Fari (Farida Rahouadj), a woman of Middle Eastern origin, who lives next door to Youri and has been a fixture in the building for 30 years. She remembers when his parents moved there when they were very young. She is friends with his mother, while lamenting how the boy has been treated so poorly by her.

Dali (Finnegan Oldfield) is a drug dealer a few years older than Youri, with whom he had clashed on previous occasions. He also refuses to leave — or has nowhere else to go — and eventually discovers Youri’s hideout. We think it’s going to lead to an unfortunate confrontation, but they wind up as allies, if uneasy ones.

Youri’s hallucinations grow more extreme, and he gains an imaginary companion in Laika, the Russian dog that was the first animal to orbit the Earth. (It’s depicted as a huge dark hound, when the real pup was an 11-pound stray mongrel.) As his grasp on reality grew more unhinged, my empathy for the teen also diminished.

“Gagarine” is a journey that you might enjoy more than I did. Bathily is an empathetic figure, but as a novice actor isn’t able to adequately convey the complex emotional states Youri goes through. The screenplay isn’t a help, choosing to decouple from his earthbound challenges rather than face them square on.

Despite an intriguing concept and ascent, the movie gets knocked off its promising trajectory.