Brilliant synthesis of historically accurate drama, Italian neo-realism, and cinema verite

Rating: 10/10 (15 August 2007)

Gillo Pontecorvo's 'The Battle of Algiers' is a masterpiece in the finest sense of the word. Few films are as emotionally and intellectually stirring, and complex. The film follows Ali La Pointe (Brahim Hadjadj) as he joins and eventually attempts to lead the FLN in the Algerian revolt against French colonial power. Opening with the end we see La Pointe hiding in the wall of a FLN hideout as an FLN member tips off the French army as to where he is hiding. The French Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin) is standing on the other side of the wall he is hiding in warning him that he has to come out or he will be forced to blow up the building, killing everyone inside. Then Pontecorvo brings the audience back to before La Pointe joined the FLN. This gives the film a hunting residue of looming failure, a pure sense of hopelessness for the rebels you are pulling for. Or at least the rebels I was pulling for. Part of the beauty of Pontecorvo's portrayal of the rebellion is that it isn't one-sided; it doesn't attempt to say the rebels were right and deserved their independence and the French were occupying dictators. It tends to lean that way, but the portrayal is much more complex than that. Both sides kill innocents in an attempt to seek revenge against those who have injured innocents on their side. The audience relates to, and respects, La Pointe and the FLN, while despising their methods. At the same time you can respect Mathieu and the French for their attempts to end things peacefully and the respect Mathieu shows for the FLN leaders he captures, in private and in the press. Taking in equal parts from the Italian Neo-Realistic tradition and the 60s cinema verite school, the film alternates between gritty footage of the FLN roaming the city streets, plotting and planning their revolt. Humanizing and immortalizing them. Then the footage jarringly rotates to more documentary style footage of Algerians in the streets, striking, protesting or roaming the markets of Algiers. Shot in a, sometimes, grainy black and white the film finds beauty in rawness and jarring, rough shots, finds beauty in the hideous and the luscious. Every bombing, interview, jail, city street or hole in the wall carries a dark, sweeping, beauty that the audience doesn't have to search to find. Easily one of the best films on wartime politics and on revolutionaries ever made. It's haunting, the kind of film that will stick with you for days, leaving you grappling with moral complexities and desiring to determine a more definite sense of self. This is what cinema should be. It can be hard to communicate when a film is this good in an era when criticism lends itself towards the sensational and the linguistically fluid for even the tritest trash film, but this, this is a powerfully moving film. A mix of the raw and harsh eye of Cassavetes, the violently prophetic scenarios of Scorsese and the morally marginalizing notions of Kubrick at his best. An absolute must-see for anyone who considers himself, or herself, a fan, not of film, but of cinema. A film that has never been more apt for America, contemplating the moral complexities of war, and the utter lack of that proverbial line where right and wrong collide.