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The live wire and the lost cause and the flow of history that vindicates them. Algiers from 1954 to 1957 plus a 1960 prologue, the tail end of nearly a century and a half of French occupation. (Not for nothing does the setting point to Pépé le Moko, and the flashback structure to Le Jour se Lève.) "The first step toward independence" has the young street hustler (Brahim Haggiag) transformed into a National Liberation Front firebrand, the soulful face in the darkened hideout. Guerrilla tactics move from shooting police officers to planting bombs in cafés, against them "Operation Champagne" engineered by the ruthlessly intelligent paratroop commander (Jean Martin), ex-member of la Résistance, Indochina vet and no fan of Sartre. "Remember, we are at war with colonialism." Gillo Pontecorvo in Algeria like Marx in India, a staggering mixture of insurrectionary heat and mournful contemplation. The filming is a keen adjustment of Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano for the demands of the situation: Fast and handheld location work, volatile newsreel grays, telephoto lenses on clamoring crowds, every resource for the pressure of the camera to visualize the Casbah as a jangling nerve center. A talk with the insurgent leader is shot on the rooftops in the inky chiaroscuro of a winter night, where the outlook is laid out: "It's hard enough to start a revolution, even harder to sustain it, and hardest of all to win it." The famous bomb sequence departs from Hitchcock's Sabotage with a little joke on Gallic lechery. "So let's talk about torture," Picasso's "weeping women," a dash of Bach in Ennio Morricone's score for views of sanctioned brutality. The coda places the struggle in the hands of the people, "the duty of resistance" goes on. Modernist cinema for modernist warfare, an incendiary protest tract that wound up studied by the Pentagon. Cinematography by Marcello Gatti. With Saadi Yacef, Samia Kerbash, Ugo Paletti, and Fusia El Kader. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |