Hors la loi

Rachid Bouchareb (2010)

The film has a serious subject, and one I knew nothing about:  the terrorist activities of the Algerian independence movement in France in the years between 1954 and 1962 and ‘La main rouge’, a counter outfit set up (according to the film) by the French secret service to carry out attacks which could then be attributed to the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN).   In the prologue and early sequences Rachid Bouchareb sets up the grounds for Algerian resentment against the French.  The family whose three sons are the principal characters in Outside the Law are evicted by colonialists from their poor dwelling in rural Algeria in 1930, when Messaoud, Abdelkader and Saïd are still boys.   In May 1945, at the end of the war in Europe, the French authorities massacre demonstrators in the Algerian market town of Sétif.  A few years later, young Algerian men, including Messaoud, are being conscripted into the French forces fighting in Indochina.  (That conflict was at the heart of Bouchareb’s 2006 film Days of Glory.)  But seriousness of subject matter is no guarantee of depth or quality, and Outside the Law lacks both.  Often boring and unimaginative, the movie is also continually violent.  There’s violence organised either by the FLN or the French authorities and unplanned violence; the presentation of both varieties is consistently hollow and, as a result, increasingly repellent.  You never get a sense of what the violence means to any of the people meting it out.

In this respect, Outside the Law is the polar opposite of The Godfather films.  In other respects, it’s obviously imitative of them – not just thematically (the tensions between different kinds of loyalty) but also in particular incidents, like the secretion of a gun to be used by Abdelkader to murder a vicious cop and the killing of his French girlfriend by a car bomb intended for him. There are plenty of spectacular shoot-outs, even if Christophe Beaucarne’s cinematography is so relentlessly dark-toned that they can be difficult to make out.  The shoot-outs seem incongruously flashy in a film that purports to be thoughtful political history (although, according to the Wikipedia article on Outside the Law, it’s widely regarded by the cognoscenti as grossly inaccurate as history).  Rachid Bouchareb can’t get anywhere near replicating the complexity of Coppola.  Bouchareb’s depiction of the workings of the FLN lacks both texture and people – the focus on Abdelkader and Messaoud is too exclusive.  The narrative spans a good few years but there’s no evidence of shifting balances of power within the movement, of new recruits coming through, developing influence, creating rivalries.

Bouchareb likes to indicate explicitly where and when things are happening:  each large movement forward in time and change of place is indicated by legends on the screen and in the closing stages, as the plotting becomes more complicated and the locations change more often, these legends become almost comical.  When he can’t use these signposts, Bouchareb isn’t good at clarifying the passage of time.  An episode involving Abdelkader and Messaoud being thrown out of a bar, then going back to murder the bar owner, then the police who are investigating the crime bursting in on Messaoud’s wedding ceremony, all seems, improbably, to be taking place on the same afternoon.   One thing that’s not exactly wrong but still feeds odd about the film is the age of the three brothers by the time the main events unfold.  You’re particularly conscious of this in the case of Messaoud when he goes to fight in Indochina:  he looks to be pushing forty.

The film’s serious intentions are reflected not in its substance but in the portentous music (by Armand Amar) and the committed but monotonous performances by the actors playing Messaoud and Abdelkader, Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila respectively.  The script by Bouchareb and Olivier Lorelle conceives each of the brothers as one essential aspect of the Algerian psyche of the period:  Messaoud is the soldier; Abdelkader is the political hardliner; Saïd is more divided, between family ties and the lure and animation of French society.  That makes him more entertaining than his brothers on paper and Jamel Debbouze’s characterisation is much the richest, as well as the liveliest, of the three.  Outside the Law might have been a better film if Saïd, living in two worlds, had been the protagonist with the other brothers relatively background.

It’s Saïd who gets the brothers’ elderly mother over to France but she despises and virtually disowns him for the way he makes a living, running some kind of club and as a boxing coach.  I didn’t understand how the matriarch (Chafia Boudraa), living in a shanty area for Algerian immigrants, could be so aware of how Saïd lived his life but, as it turns out, oblivious to the other sons’ terrorist activities.    The plotting of the climactic convergence between Saïd’s world and Abdelkader’s is incredible and there are other crudely engineered confrontations between characters.   Abdelkader arranges the kidnap of the foxy military intelligence man Faivre (Bernard Blancan), who fought with Messaoud in Indochina and is now on the brothers’ trail.  Faivre is detained just long enough for him and Abdelkader to tell each other, and the audience, what they stand for, before being released and allowed to resume his pursuit of the brothers.

11 May 2011