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.

  

FILM REVIEW: INCENDIES

Nawal (Lubna Azabal) in Incendies.

Before the Rain

By Don Simpson

After their mother Nawal’s (Lubna Azabal) death, twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) are faced with a puzzle that they must solve in order to fulfill their mother’s last will and testament. According to their mother’s most recent employer (Rémy Girard) — a notary who was designated as the will’s executor — two letters must be delivered, one to their father and one to their brother. This is a puzzle because Jeanne and Simon assumed that their father was long dead and this is the first time that they have ever heard about the existence of any siblings.

Simon wants nothing at all to do with their lunatic mother’s crazy mind games, so it is Jeanne (quite purposefully a mathematician, therefore a staunch believer in absolute answers) who embarks upon the journey from Montreal to the fictional city of Daresh — which is located in an unnamed Middle Eastern nation (probably Lebanon) — in search of their family’s roots and to fulfill their mother’s postmortem wishes. As Jeanne digs deeper into Nawal’s past she discovers a woman she never knew existed. For starters, Jeanne discovers that Nawal’s memory is very much alive in Daresh — but not in a good way — as Jeanne is told by the local women, “You are not welcome here.” Not a good start. Meanwhile, the audience witnesses Nawal’s past by way of flashbacks, causing the past and the present to run parallel to each other in the context of the film's narrative.

Nawal’s life as a Christian living in the Middle East is marred by tragedy: she witnesses the murder of her unborn child’s father at the hands of her own family; she gives birth to the child, whom she then has to abandon immediately; she is the lone survivor after a bus of Muslim women is shot up and burned by Christian nationalists (who flaunt images of the Virgin Mary on their machine guns -- oh, the irony); she assassinates her homeland’s Christian nationalist leader; she endures endless rapings, by the same prison guard, while incarcerated in prison.

By never naming the Middle Eastern nation, writer-director Denis Villeneuve purposefully avoids any sense of historical specificity; he cares more about focusing on the endless cycles of violence in the Middle East. Villeneuve takes aim specifically at the religious influences on the violence. Nawal is a modern woman of Christian descent in an Arabic-speaking country. As a direct result of the fate of her baby and baby-daddy, Nawal grows to hate that the nationalist cause is being waged in the name of Christianity. The personal becomes political as Nawal joins the Muslim opposition’s militia and becomes a political assassin in the hope of retrieving her son (who has presumably been kidnapped by Muslim soldiers during a raid on the Christian orphanage in which he was held). To further signify her wavering religious identity and allegiance, Nawal alternates between wearing a Christian cross and a Muslim head scarf -- depending on which religion plays to her advantage at that specific moment in time.

It is worth mentioning that Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated film (it lost to In a Better World) -- which was adapted from Wajdi Mouawad’s stage play of the same title -- opens as young Middle Eastern boys queue up to have their heads shaved, signaling their initialization as soldiers, to the soundtrack of Radiohead’s “You and Whose Army”. This is a brilliant use of “You and Whose Army." Other Radiohead tunes are found sprinkled throughout Incendies, but none work quite as well as this one.