Scandalously relevant.

Rating: 7/10 (16 December 2004)

I disagree with the comments here stating that Gillo Pontecorvo's *The Battle of Algiers* is an even-handed account of the Algerian uprising in the Fifties. I had always thought, perhaps simple-mindedly, that the movie was clearly on the side of the denizens of the Kasbah. After all, the script was inspired by the life and activities of a FLN leader who also literally acts in an important role in the movie. Seeing the movie again -- via Criterion's absurdly lavish 3-disc (!) edition -- did nothing to alter my opinion, though it DID provoke some new perspective on why the movie may SEEM even-handed.
In two words? Jean Martin. He plays Colonel Mathieu, a former Resistance fighter and concentration camp veteran, now in the untenable position of winning a battle in a war doomed to failure for the French. Martin happens to be the only professional actor on the premises, and this probably explains his dangerous magnetism on screen and his ability to get us to immediately latch onto him for "identification". Everybody admires a good soldier, and Mathieu is exactly that. Cool, world-weary, competent, tactically brilliant, not above admiring his enemies, sophisticated. Everybody admires a good actor, also, and Martin gets all the good lines in *The Battle of Algiers*, which is really unfortunate, because we should be admiring the Algerians instead of this professional oppressor. This is the flaw in Pontecorvo's movie that, in my opinion, prevents it from being a true masterpiece. Col. Mathieu damn near unbalances the whole thing when he irrupts into the movie about a half-hour into it.
The problem is that there are no equally compelling Muslim figures in the film to balance off Mathieu. Jaffar, played by the above-mentioned real-life FLN leader Saadi Yacef, is an important character to the plot yet has no interiority. The young man playing the fiery "Ali La Pointe" LOOKS magnificent, but the script doesn't do much for him, other than to tell him to look angry. We don't get to know the three women who tart themselves up as French sophisticates in order to sneak past the checkpoints so that they can plant bombs in civilian areas. The teenage boys who shoot the gendarmes to death are just faces in the crowd. Pontecorvo's magisterial Neo-Realism manages to be both dry and diabolically partisan: after all, a nameless mass of people avoids having character flaws, and Pontecorvo and Yacef don't want to muddy the waters with unlikeable individuals. (But perhaps we don't want that either, as the Algerians' cause is eminently just.) If you want to be politically correct, you may congratulate Pontecorvo for refusing to present the Muslims in a traditionally melodramatic way, but this approach fails the test of great drama: development of character.
Having said all that, I also don't want to be misconstrued: *The Battle of Algiers* is a great and important film that is an almost mandatory viewing experience, given the shocking and scandalous similarities between what's going on in Arabia right now and the events of the Algerian uprising depicted in this film. It appears that officials at the Pentagon screened this movie for themselves a couple of years ago: one hopes that the scenes of torture in *The Battle of Algiers* didn't give them some kinky ideas for Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, though it's rather hard to imagine what other uses they could get out of the movie (besides, of course, the obvious lesson: don't mess with the Muslims). The scenes of torture, terrorism, and the loud clamoring for freedom will alternately raise blood pressures and stoke outrage, regardless of an individual's political bias. The cinematography by Marcello Gatti is a culmination of Neo-Realist and cinema-verite techniques, and the score by Ennio Morricone is groundbreaking.
Make an effort to see *The Battle of Algiers*; it will truly pay off. No film released in the Sixties has more relevance for us today than this one. 7 stars out of 10.