Outside The Law

Introduction

Algeria, 1925. The French had been the colonial masters of the Algerians for nearly a hundred years and not shy in using the law against the simplicity of most Algerian natives lives. Here a family of 7 are evicted from the home and land they have inhabited for generations as they don't have paper deeds and a Frenchman has claimed the land for himself.

The family move to a town called Sétif. The three brothers in the family move in different directions. Saïd (Jamel Debbouze), the younger, gets involved in boxing as a promoter of local talent, arranging fights in the streets of Sétif. Massaoud (Roschdy Zem) joins the French paratroops and goes off to fight in Indochina. Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila) becomes a leader in the Algerian independence movement. A march through Sétif organised by Abdelkader on VE day, where the first shouts for independence are heard, leads to a terrible overreaction by the French colonial masters and leads to the Sétif massacre.

Abdelkader is captured and sent to prison in France, where he is schooled in Algerian political thought by other, older Algerian political prisoners. Massaoud has also been imprisoned, but by the Vietnamese after the defeat of the French in Indochina. Saïd decides to leave Sétif for France, taking his mother with him, where they are forced to stay in the slums of Nanterre. Saïd avoids the more usual route of finding work at the local Renault factory by getting involved in shady activities such as prostitution, and then both a cabaret club and back into boxing.

Abdelkader is eventually released from prison and shortly afterwards Massaoud arrives home from his prisoner of war camp. Both men decide to carry on the fight for Algerian independence from within the NLF (National Liberation Front), an organisation that advocates violent struggle for the independence of their country. The two brothers try to get Saïd to join them but he is too focussed on making his mark as a boxing promoter to bother with such things.

The NLF membership gets bigger and the campaigns more audacious and brutal, leading to the involvement of ex-military man Colonel Faivre (Bernard Blancan) who is given carte blanche to bring the nationalists down. As the stakes get higher, the three brothers will eventually be brought together in their fight for Algerian freedom…

Sound

Soundtracks are available in French 5.1 Surround and French 2.0 Stereo with English subtitles.

Extras

Only the two extras this time, a Making Of plus an interview with director Rachid Bouchareb. Both, again, are more interesting then the norm as we get to explore the background to the film, its cultural significance and how France appears to be willing to look at its more brutal colonial past.

Overall

In 2006, a film made French history. That film was Indigènes (or Days of Glory) and recounted the story of Algerian men who fought for France during WWII. This film made history because in 1959 when the French colonies were getting ready for independence in the post-World War II era, France decided that it would freeze the pensions of its colonial veterans. This move meant that most Algerian veterans would receive about a third less pension then French veterans of the same campaigns. Successive French Governments had looked at this but done nothing. Then in 2006 things changed when President Chirac and his wife were invited to view this film. They were moved so much that he formally recognised the injustice shown towards the Algerian veterans by awarding them full pension rights.

This was not the whole story though, not by a long chalk, and director Rachid Bouchareb reunited his central cast from that film for a more expansive film that looks at the struggle for Algerian independence after the events shown in Indigènes. Its not a sequel as such, but the reunited cast make it seem as if you are watching the lives of the soldiers from the previous film in the period 1945 to 1962 - despite the fact they're all playing different characters.

It's a great film that spans nearly 20 years crammed into a 2 hour running time, and it's a measure of both Algeria's confidence as a nation and France's ability to look at its colonial past that this film was made at all. Algeria provided approx. 25% of the budget after seeing an outline of what would be covered, this apparently is a first for the Algerian government. Around 55% of the budget came from French sources, despite the subject matter casting the French almost as the villains of the piece, although the NFL are shown to be as brutal in their fight for the cause. There has been some criticism over the accuracy of some events, namely the Sétif massacre, but director Bouchareb used many eye witness accounts as research for his script.

The acting is superb all round with the picture doubling as both a thriller and a look at a family through its struggles over a generation. There are a couple of touches reminiscent of The Godfather but Bouchareb is careful not to milk that as his film is about freedom fighters with a just cause rather than criminals on the rise.

It's worth noting that Outside The Law was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2011 Oscars, a mark of its quality.

Recommended.