Outside the Law

Cannes (Official Selection) – Controversy and even a degree of chaos come to Cannes 2010, as director Rachid Bouchareb uses France's colonial past in North Africa as the bedrock on which to build an expansive thriller, and upsets the French nationalists in the process. Paul Martin tries to find an inside line on all the hullabaloo.

The morning of the Cannes premiere of Outside the Law and the controversy which has been swirling around the movie for weeks threatens to boil over. A baking hot day, one of the most stiflingly warm of the film festival fortnight, and armour-clad riot police are required to halt an estimated 1,000-plus protesters from reaching the Palais des Festival where the film is showing. Despite the grievances of the dissenters and the intimidating garb of the cops, the protest passes without major incident.

The cause for all this fuss is France's relationship with Algeria, the North African country having been invaded by the former in 1830 and ruled over as a colony for more than 130 years after that. A colonial past is always a difficult and chastening thing for any nation to address - as we English are all too painfully aware of – and there is typically defiance from the far-right whenever an account appears which confronts the misdeeds of the occupiers. Indeed, Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose National Front party were involved in the Outside the Law march at Cannes, even got the hump with The Battle of Algiers, which was generally considered to have given the French a decent crack of the whip.

On this occasion the nationalists have had a specific gnat in their ear too, with them decrying Outside the Law's portrayal of the Sétif massacre of 1945, when French police clashed with Algerian equal rights protesters in the town of that name. For his part, the movie's French-Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb has made the point that his is a dramatic piece first and foremost, suggesting that - while historically-based - it has been conceived more as a spur for debate, a trigger for people to read up on these episodes themselves, rather than being taken as a strict record of facts which are still disputed by the various parties. Concerning the Sétif massacre (actually one of the earliest scenes in the movie), Bouchareb posits the reasonable point of view that the truth of the incident continues to be obfuscated by such displays of ill-will as that which enveloped his film on its Cannes debut.

Given all the attendant brouhaha, those who actually sit down to watch Outside the Law are in for a surprise. Because rather than some kind of kinetic, controversy-baiting cinematic jackhammer, perhaps akin to Mathieu Kassovitz' stunning La Haine, Bouchareb's film turns out to be an ordered, slickly-produced action-drama, not a million miles removed from other such lengthy political period pieces as Steven Spielberg's Munich and Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd. It looks wonderful, with evidently no expense spared on either the costume or production design, but it is also a rather conventional movie, shorn of narrative shocks and surprises.

Focusing on three Algerian brothers, the story primarily takes place during the later years of the French occupation, running from the time of the Sétif massacre till Algeria's declaration of independence on 5 July 1962 – years in which resentment was steadily growing amongst the native populace towards the European settlers. Having seen their father stripped of his land by colonialists in a 1925-set prologue, we rejoin the now-adult brethren 20 years later, on 8 May 1945, the day France was celebrating victory over Germany in World War II and Algeria was scene for the protests that led to the deaths in Sétif. Of the three brothers, Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila) is politically charged and at the heart of those fateful demonstrations, while diminutive Saïd (Jamel Debbouze) has no interest in such matters, the little street hustler being instead fixated on the next boxing bout he is setting up. Eldest of the brothers, the physically imposing Messaoud (Roschdy Zem) is otherwise engaged as a soldier, soon to be deployed in the Indochina War.

The years spin by, with the trio eventually reuniting around their mother (Chafia Boudraa) in a shantytown on the outskirts of Paris - the Eiffel Tower and the moneyed metropolis of which it is a symbol being but the most distant speck on the horizon. Though Messaoud and Abdelkader become active in the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), the armed resistance movement, Saïd resists aligning himself with them, instead finding there is cash to be made as a nightclub owner, and happiness to be gleaned from grooming a stable of young boxers.

It is hard to fault Outside the Law in terms of its individual components. As already mentioned, it is a richly handsome film, and it is very well acted too, with strong performances coming from each of the three leading men. There are also some tense and exciting sequences, most notably the FLN's assassination attempt on Inspector Picot (Jean-Pierre Lorit), which results in a titanic police station-based gun battle. However although the script by Bouchareb and Olivier Lorelle generally does a good job of elucidating the politics and the history in effectively expedient fashion, you wish a few more risks had been taken with the various narrative journeys of the central characters, all of which prove to be disappointingly predictable.

If only every scene crackled with tense intelligence the way that meeting between Abdelkader and the man charged with hunting him, Colonel Faivre (Bernard Blancan), does. A respectful rapport established between the foes, Abdelkader draws a striking parallel between he and his FLN compatriots and the French Resistance to which Faivre belonged during the Nazi occupation. It is an allusion further underlined by director Bouchareb in the sequences that top and tail his movie; sequences made up real-life news footage, respectively depicting French and Algerian jubilation as the liberations of May 1945 and July 1962 are celebrated.

Rating on a scale of 5 in-laws: 3.5

Release Date: TBC
Directed by: Rachid Bouchareb
Screenplay by: Rachid Bouchareb, Olivier Lorelle
Starring: Sami Bouajila, Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem, Chafia Boudraa
Cert: TBC
Running time: 131 minutes