Outside the Law

Outside the Law is the last of last year's nominees for Best Foreign Language film that I'm taking a look at. It's a tough call as to whether I liked it less than Biutiful, but it's close. Needless to say, it didn't deserve inclusion.

A representative of Algeria, the film is largely in French, and documents the long struggle for Algerian independence from France seen through the eyes of three brothers. When we first see them, they are children watching their father's farm being taken from them, presumably by French colonialists. Then we are at the end of World War II. While Europe is celebrating V-E days, Algerians were being massacred in a city called Setif, where are heroes come from.

In reading about the film there is a lot of controversy about how accurate it is about that massacre. I'm in no position to judge, but I did find the director, Rachid Bouchareb, takes a stand of simple outrage that obfuscates the storytelling. In the early going, the action hurdles forward so many years that it's tough to keep track of how we should be feeling. Bouchareb seems to be saying, "Just hate the French, that's the simple thing to do."

The three brother take different paths--Said (Jamel Debouzze), is a bantam-sized hustler, who only wants to make money. He takes his mother to Paris and works as a low-level pimp before moving up to being a manager of boxers. Massaoud (Roschdy Zern), fights for France in the early Indochina War and is taken prisoner. He is released with a damaged eye, but tracks his family down to Paris. Also in Paris, but in jail for his revolutionary ideas, is the intellectual brother, Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila). When he is released he foments rebellion and is under the watchful eye of the police, personified by the dutiful Colonel Faivre (Bernard Blancan).

Bouchareb also directed the Oscar-nominated Days of Glory, which was a standard World War II movie, albeit with the novelty of it taking the point of view of Algerians fighting for their colonial masters. All three of the brothers were in that film as well. I don't know what it is about Bouchareb's style that appeals to the voters; perhaps it has a comforting, 1950s vibe that the older voters respond to. For no matter how incendiary or angry Bouchareb tries to make his film, it falls directly in the tried and true formats of similar films of the genre.

The three brothers are never fully realized as characters. Zerny, who has fore sworn killing and wants to get to know his wife and son better, comes closest. Bouajilay is portrayed as a man who has sold his soul to his cause, while Debouzze is the biggest puzzle. Perhaps his character is the simplest--make a buck. The brothers do display loyalty to each other, even when Debouzze angers the movement by having his fighter fight for the French championship, which is a no-no among revolutionary Algerians.

Outside the Law is also derivative--one gets the impression that Bouchareb watched The Godfather before filming. A few of the killings seem directly pulled from that classic, especially a car bombing where a despondent man watches helplessly as his beloved is blown to bits, recalling Michael and Appolonia in the Coppola film. Another scene, in which Debouzze takes revenge on the man who evicted his family, is right out of The Godfather, Part II, when Vito goes back to Sicily to get the old man who wiped out his family. "I'm Vito Andolini, and this is for you." The copy is a pale imitation.

One scene I greatly admired also reminded me of another film. Bouajila and Balcan have a sit-down meeting, in which they understand they are not that far apart. Bouajila asks Balcan if he regrets his work during the French Resistance against the Germans, equating the Algerian struggle to that of the French under Nazism. Balcan understands, but will not stop hunting the terrorists down. It's a good scene, but it seems lifted from the great sit-down that Al Pacino and Robert De Niro had in Michael Mann's Heat.

Perhaps that's why Bouchareb is liked by the Academy--he examines an exotic topic--the Algerian independence movement, by making a film firmly entrenched in Western filmmaking habits.