A perpetually relevant story.

Rating: 10/10 (19 December 2007)

**SPOILERS BELOW**
Despite the visual style of this film, which makes it seem almost like a documentary set in the 1950s, contemporary viewers will find it strikingly relevant to the present day. Set in French-occupied Algeria, it tracks the story of Algerian resistance and attempts for liberation, and French countermeasures. While it does not paint an especially sympathetic portrait of the French, it doesn't shy away from showing Algerians placing bombs in civilian areas either. It does, however, depict the way that no action is without cause or consequence. From the very beginning, it is quite frank, without being gratuitously gruesome, about the ugly realities of torture  something of a taboo in the present climate  and of the way that violence begets violence, in an unsustainable spiral. Interestingly, although the film ends with a seeming defeat for one side, those watching the film today will know how things turned out in the time after the closing events. This knowledge gives a special poignance to the seemingly futile actions of resistance.
Although the movie's focus is on the central character, Ali La Pointe, a young Algerian who becomes politicized and radicalized after witnessing an execution by guillotine, it really is the story of the Algerian community as a whole. The film depicts the steady accretion of humiliation and despair around the core of French occupation. Many youths are unemployed, and the contemptuous treatment they receive at the hands of the French, to whom they are of interest only as servants, save when pretty girls are whistled at, serves to further stoke their anger. The initiation of Ali into the FLN is like joining a gang  he must prove himself by making himself vulnerable. The FLN addresses not only the material losses of the Algerian people, but also their loss of dignity. The daring raids against French police, the seizure of the microphone used to blast disheartening messages into the Algerian quarter, and other such tactics function to unite and uplift the community by putting active resistance on open display. The French respond by escalating violence even further, killing children, and the Algerians then respond with a further escalation.
By incorporating women and children, Ali and his cohorts weave themselves into the fabric of their society. The women are handled in a particularly interesting way. A far cry from the two-dimensional arm-candy found in big budget Hollywood productions, these women neither sit passively at home, keeping the fire going for their men, nor do they behave like macho caricatures. In one particularly affecting sequence, three women each put on makeup, color their hair, and adopt western dress in order to head into the French zone and plant bombs. The women are variously fierce, or appear to have their hearts pounding in fear, each according to her own temperament. The intensity of their desperation for self-determination is palpable, even after so many years of occupation. Despite this, the director does not hesitate to show who is going to be killed by the bombs they plant. Many of these people are innocent or unknowing, like the small child with ice cream, or the teenagers happily dancing to music. When the bombs go off, there is panic, and shattered bodies are carried out  once again, violence has begotten violence.
The French response is to continue to bring a sort of 'scientific' pressure to bear. Colonel Mathieu (played by Jean Martin  interestingly this is the only major role played by a professional actor) is completely impassive and unemotional in his approach, treating the FLN as a problem to be solved. He requires of his superiors that they allow him to abandon all humanity and brutalize any captive, as needed. He is thus delighted when he is given an 'excuse' to pen the Algerians into the Casbah, like rabbits. His every move is polished and calculated, and he even laments, "Why are the Sartres always born on the other side?" The French are shown destroying shops  and then handing out loaves of bread. Surely there is no more striking illustration of how colonialism functions than that one. When he captures the rebel leader, he allows him to speak to the press, but only for long enough to make the point that he has been seized  he ends the interview before he begins to engender too much sympathy. His theory about the rebels is in fact in some respects accurate: violence does not win wars  the goal of the FLN is to show the populace at large that it is possible to resist. During the scene where Colonel Mathieu alludes to his own capture by Nazis in WWII, one wants to shout at the screen. Did he learn nothing from his experiences? Has he not found any compassion at all? The haunting sound of ululations ringing out in grief over the city suggests that it is perhaps this very element, the compassion of the Algerian people for one another, that ultimately enables them to oust the French, despite their superior, scientific tactics and their sophisticated weaponry. It would seem that the lesson here is obvious, but regrettably it is one lesson that people appear to need to learn anew with each generation.