Our Problems (2004)
★½ — Our Problems (2004)
I wanted to like Our Problems. Truly, I did. A film offering a glimpse into Guinean refugee life through the struggles of a single family sounds urgent, necessary, exactly the kind of story that deserves a platform. And for a few early moments, I thought it might deliver. Then it kept going.
The central problem is one of ambition overreach. The film clearly wants to be a sweeping portrait of resilience and systemic failure, with each character functioning as a kind of walking emblem of a broader social issue. Poverty here, displacement there, generational conflict over that way. In theory, that allegorical framework can work beautifully. In practice, it feels less like storytelling and more like someone scribbled social issues onto sticky notes and arranged them into scenes. The themes don't grow out of the characters. The characters exist to carry the themes, and that's a fundamental difference.
The intercutting between storylines makes things worse rather than better. Rather than building any sense of momentum or connection between the various threads, it's jarring. Flipping channels between documentaries mid-sentence is about the right analogy. You're never quite settled into one emotional register before the film yanks you somewhere else entirely. Which brings me to the tonal whiplash, because this is where Our Problems really loses me.
There's a scene where a grandmother quizzes her grandson about her teeth. It should be charming. It should be one of those little domestic moments that anchors you to a family and makes you care about what happens to them. And there's the seed of something genuinely warm in it. But the film surrounds it with such unrelenting bleakness that the humour curdles rather than breathes. One minute you're smiling at family banter, the next you're watching a teenager being coerced into crime. The shift isn't poignant contrast, it's just exhausting. The comedy, when it comes, lands with all the subtlety of a sitcom laugh track, which is the last thing you want when the surrounding material is this heavy.
The performances are earnest throughout, I'll give them that. Nobody here looks like they're phoning it in, and that sincerity counts for something. But the characters themselves are so thinly sketched, their motivations so muddled, that even committed acting can only do so much. You end up watching people embody problems rather than live lives, and that distance keeps you at arm's length from start to finish.
Technically, it's rough going too. The sound quality fluctuates noticeably, and the pacing drags in stretches where a tighter edit would have helped enormously. None of that would be fatal on its own. Low budgets and imperfect craft are part of the landscape when you're watching cinema from corners of the world that don't have Hollywood resources behind them. I've seen films made on next to nothing that absolutely floor you, because the story and the humanity are doing the heavy lifting. I think of Little by Little, Jean Rouch's quietly devastating look at West African life, as an example of how much you can achieve with limited means when the vision is genuinely coherent.
Our Problems doesn't quite get there. The will is clearly present. The intention is good, maybe even admirable. But intention isn't execution, and a well-meaning lecture with shaky camerawork is still a lecture. At a generous one and a half stars, it's a film I respect more than I enjoyed, and even the respect is complicated.
The A-Z World Movie Tour marches on. Guinea, considered. Next stop, somewhere new.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2004 | Watched: 2025-06-26
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