Outside the Law

Outside the Law   -Rage Born of Despair

Dir Rachid Bouchareb

Starring Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila

This fine epic traces the course of the Algerian resistance against the colonial French for the best part of forty years throughout the twentieth century. We see the story unfold though the eyes of three brothers whose Algerian family is forced from their homeland by a slip of paper and a God given right for French grandeur and prosperity. It is a sweeping grand scale piece of work shot, acted and costumed beautifully. Themes of justice, family duty and identity tension between that of the individual and that of the citizen are interwoven as we follow the three brothers, each with their own vision of freedom as well as the assumed price they each must pay to secure it.

The acting from the three leads is superb and as we see the resistance movement grow from a small band of men struggling to finance their operations, to a large scale, well organised and funded army we are reminded of both Coppola's Godfather (1972) as well as Bertolucci's 1900 (1976), both in story as well as style.

The theme of the displaced and unjustly removed rings very loud from an Australia/Aboriginal point of view. The absurdity of one nation claiming authority over another's land is made very clear with quick economy in the opening scene. Likewise the media reporting throughout the film via news and radio is hauntingly similar to our own unfortunate tendency to paint our modern day villains with a heavy handed brush. The film shows clearly the Algerian cause to be just and yet the media in the film portrays them with a similar hatred and fear mongering as the dreaded “boat people” and “foaming Muslims” are treated to in today's Australian mainstream media.

There are some moments of genuine nail chewing as police head quarters are infiltrated and suspects are interrogated and thankfully the inevitable torture scenes that must occur in these types of pictures, occurs mainly off screen. What is made very clear is the sacrifice the Algerian resistance fighters underwent in order to achieve the victory that came to them in the early part of the 1960's. Not simply sacrificing their lives in battle but sacrificing a normal life in order to maintain the struggle. In order to secure freedom and a homeland for their children, they deny the same children a father who is consistently present. For some in the film this leads to abandoning the idea of family altogether.

The piece lacks a certain amount of emotional depth and the viewer is at times left feeling detached from the characters. It doesn't seem to have the bite one expects from such a work. A further criticism may be that the political realities of the day are not abundantly clear for the uninitiated and perhaps it may have benefited from being an hour or so longer al le Malcolm X (1992).

What is clear is how awful human beings can be to each other and whether it's English bastards or French bastards or any other bastards, we still obviously have quite away to go before we reach our human potential.