FILM REVIEW: FREE MEN

 Younes (Tahir Rahim) in Free Men.

Some might

By Ed Rampell

The 1942 classic Casablanca is set in North Africa. However, its World War II era protagonists are all Westerners. But what role did North Africans play during WWII? French cinema has been revisiting this with Rachid Bouchareb’s 2006 Oscar-nominated Days of Glory (Indigenes), and now with Free Men, another great movie by a director with North African roots, French-Moroccan co-writer-director Ismael Ferroukhi.

Free Men takes place entirely in France, where -- due to its colonial empire -- there was a substantial population of Arab ancestry during the Nazi occupation. For the most part, cinema has overlooked the role Arabs played during WWII; the Bush era propaganda mantra of the “Axis of Evil”, which included Iraq, even implied those Arabs were part of the Axis powers, which included Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Tojo’s Japan. But Free Men, which is inspired by real life events, tells a distinctly different story.

Tahar Rahim (who gave such a towering performance in 2009’s A Prophet) plays Younes, a black marketeer coerced by the Nazis to spy on Paris’ Mosque, a hotbed of anti-Nazi activity presided over by its rector Ben Ghabrit (Michael Lonsdale). Like the filmmaker Bouchareb, Younes is of Algerian ancestry, and like Malcolm X he rises from being a lumpenized criminal to attaining political consciousness, joining his cousin Ali (Farid Larbi) and love interest Leila (Lubna Azabal) in the Resistance. However, the North African comrades make a point of not only resisting fascism, but colonialism, too.

An excellent director, Ferroukhi’s action packed film is tautly, tensely paced and full of suspense and wartime heroics, as the Arabic partisans shoot it out with the Nazi occupiers. But what makes Free Men especially noteworthy is not only its depiction of noble Arabs resisting those ignoble Nazi savages, but the relationship between the Muslims and the Jews in occupied France. Guess who the rescuers of the persecuted Jews are in this eye opening picture? Wow! Who knew? To further enrich the film’s deep texture, there’s even a gay subplot as Younes befriends the famous North African singer Salim (Mahmoud Shalaby), who turns out to be not only Jewish, but also homosexual, to boot. 

It has often been remarked upon that when African-American WWII veterans returned home to America after helping to defeat fascism abroad, that they were unwilling to accept segregation at home. Blacks’ anti-fascist wartime service is widely credited with inspiring the ensuing Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In the same way, one imagines that Arab freedom fighters who felt their oats by resisting Nazism would likewise find postwar colonialism in countries like Algeria intolerable, thus inspiring struggles such as those immortalized in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece, The Battle of Algiers. And Free Men is a worthy successor to that revolutionary classic.