If I were one of those filmmakers in Robert Altman’s The Player, pitching my idea to some producers, and my idea was something like Outside the Law, I’d say: “It’s Rich Man, Poor Man meets The Battle of Algiers!”
Which is of course a bit of a traducement of Rachid Bouchareb’s new film, but the film is indeed a long-distance family drama set in the context of the Algerian war of independence. It contains elements of soap opera, in this case involving three Algerian brothers, as well as being a hard-headed look at the mechanics of waging an anti-colonial terror campaign.
Outside the Law starts with a prologue in which an Algerian family is summarily forced off the land it has occupied for generations to make way for a French colonist. Then we have the credits (with more co-producing entities than you can count) and we’re into the story proper, which will move forward in jumps of a few years here, a few months there, or even a decade or so when necessary, to tell us a tale that covers the period from 1945 to Algerian independence in 1962.
In case we miss the point, though, we have an early sequence showing a massacre of Algerian protesters by colonial forces. The sequence is alarmingly powerful for anyone with any sense of how such events must have played out (Sharpeville, say); as much as the forced-removal prelude, it sets the tone for the rest of the movie.
Our sympathies are to be attached to the oppressed native Algerians, even if what they do later is not always going to be very sympathetic.
The three brothers through whom the narrative is focalised are Messaoud (Roschdy Zem), who serves in the French army in Indochina, Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila), who goes to jail for his political activities, and Saïd (Jamel Debbouze), who gets involved in various activities on the edge of criminality — ordinary criminality, that is, not political. The brothers’ mother, named only as la mère (a striking Chafia Boudraa), unequivocally approves of political action, even if it’s violent and illegal, but disapproves deeply of ordinary criminality, even if that’s what will pay to reunite her with all her sons and will keep her alive in French exile.
Putting it bluntly
Bouchareb presents his narrative pretty bluntly and with pretty broad strokes. The feeling is sometimes of outright propaganda, not to mention a gap in the realism effect. When Messaoud’s army unit is in retreat from the revolutionary forces in Indochina, a dying comrade lying on Messaoud’s lap, the (unseen) radio is broadcasting a victorious speech by an anti-colonialist ideologue, making it quite clear that this colonial misadventure on the part of France portends its eventual Algerian defeat. The speaker makes an unambiguous call for similarly oppressed colonial subjects to rise up against their masters — if Indochina can do it, the message is, so can all the other colonies.
Later, when an FLN cadre is being interrogated by the French police, a television in the room is showing French President Charles de Gaulle’s visit to Algeria and his assurances that peace has now dawned. Apart from being overly convenient as far as providing the audience with information goes, this is dramatic irony of the most heavy-handed sort.
In that respect, Outside the Law is some distance from subtle. Bouchareb’s imperative, it seems, is to keep the plot moving and to confront us with the emotional drama, as quickly and powerfully as possible. This works well, on its own terms, and the climax of the movie is particularly agonising. After that, one can be forgiven for feeling some relief when newsreel footage shows the eventual freeing of Algeria from the colonial yoke, for the film has probably dragged on for rather too long — like the war itself.