Les hommes libres
Ismaël Ferroukhi (2011)
Tahar Rahim’s looks sometimes remind me of Rafael Nadal but it’s hard to fault him otherwise. An instinctive actor, he’s exceptionally good at playing men who act on instinct. As in A Prophet, his character in Free Men develops, through une éducation endurcissante, from an impulsive, detached youngster into a grown-up engaged with a cause and capable of cold-blooded homicide to further it. Rahim’s face, which has an inchoate quality in the early stages of the film, expresses his character’s growth into guarded single-mindedness; he looks momentarily baffled by what’s happening to or around him but he’s evidently quick on the uptake. He registers thoughts and feelings which the audience can pick up but which wouldn’t be noticed by the people with whom his character is sharing the screen. In the course of Free Men, Rahim’s Younes, an Algerian immigrant in Nazi-occupied Paris, is transformed from an apolitical street hustler into a member of the French resistance. Younes’ journey starts when political significance is thrust upon by the Vichy government police: they arrest Younes for his black market activities and release him in exchange for his agreeing to spy on comings and goings around the city’s mosque. It’s in the course of this snooping that Younes – encouraged by his already politically committed cousin Ali, attracted to a young woman in the resistance called Leila, and impressed by Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit, the haut fonctionnaire who is the director of the mosque – starts to think about what he’s doing, and joins the Free French liberation movement.
Younes, as the closing credits make clear, is essentially a fictional character, meant to represent many young men of his generation and nationality. The other two main characters in Free Men are based on real-life individuals – Ben Ghabrit, who died in the mid-1950s, and the Jewish Salim Halali, a famous interpreter and promoter of the arabo-andalouse music of North Africa (he died as recently as 2005). As Ben Ghabrit, Michael Lonsdale is masterly, as always: the professional face that he presents to the Vichy French authorities only just disguises Ben Ghabrit’s contempt for them – you feel his amusement and their exasperation with that. Lonsdale gets over Ben Ghabrit’s wily expertise but also the physical strain it must have been for an elderly man to conceal the extent of the activities that he was supervising: Jews are being kept hidden in the basement of the mosque. Mahmud Shalaby as Salim has a beautiful voice (I assume he does his own singing) and a beautiful face (a more masculine one than the real Salim, on the evidence of the latter’s photograph on Wikipedia). Shalaby’s good looks are more pictorial than Tahar Rahim’s but the two complement each other well. Farid Larbi is very good as Ali but Lubna Azabal as Leila uses her eyes too deliberately – you notice this particularly when she’s exchanging meaningful looks with Rahim, whose expressions are so economically incisive. Christopher Buchholz (as a senior German military man) and Bruno Fleury (as the police inspector who recruits Younes) make their characters credible, much more than standard baddies.
I was feeling pretty ill when I saw Free Men – l thought of walking out and was relieved when it was over. But this was nothing to do with the movie, which is tautly directed by Ismaël Ferroukhi and has a good screenplay by him and Alain-Michel Blanc. Although the development of the main themes of this film d’apprentissage isn’t especially imaginative, those themes are strong ones, not least because of the historical ironies they present at this distance in time. In occupied France, North African Jews can disguise themselves as Muslims. (Although I didn’t understand a scene in which a Nazi officer satisfies himself that Younes isn’t a Jew by inspecting his genitals – aren’t Muslims likely to be circumcised too?) Ferroukhi also suggests that Algerian immigrants fighting for the liberation of France had in their minds the future liberation of their native land from French colonial rule. This idea resonates because of what actually happened in the years post-1945, even if Ferroukhi presents it perhaps too explicitly: the group of men that Younes joins don’t just make these connections in their heads – they chant, ‘Down with fascist oppression, down with colonialism’ (or words to that effect). One or two sequences are staged a bit too obviously – for example, when Salim is arrested just as he’s preparing to accompany an older arabo-andalouse performer whom he reveres and has long wanted to sing with. More often, though, Ferroukhi delivers the big moments convincingly as well as excitingly – like the moment in a cemetery when Salim’s claims to the Vichy that he’s a Muslim are substantiated, and his life is saved, by the miraculous appearance of an inscription on a gravestone there. The climactic sequence in which an anonymous barge carrying Jews to safety sets off from the Seine is gripping and effective in its description of the escape of many and the staying put, to further the Free French campaign, of the leading man. The good dramatic score is by Armand Amar.
30 May 2012
