La Question (1977) - film review

Algiers, 1957.  Henri Charlegue is the editor of a newspaper that is sympathetic to the cause of the FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front).  Fearing that he may be arrested for involvement with FLN activities, Charlegue goes into hiding.  When he subsequently visits his friend and colleague Maurice Oudinot, he is taken into custody by French paratroopers and locked up in a prison camp, where he is subjected to increasingly cruel forms of torture.  Despite his ill-treatment, Charlegue refuses to betray the people who sheltered him, although he fears for the safety of his wife.  He does not know that Oudinot has just died whilst being tortured and that the military are working hard to conceal the fact...

When Henri Alleg’s autobiographical account of his experiences at the hands of the French military in Algeria was published in February 1958, in a small book entitled La Question, it provoked a scandal in France.  The book was uncompromising in its description of the torture methods used by French paratroopers and proved embarrassing for both the military and the government, who were quick to denounce it and have it removed from circulation.   Twenty years on, Laurent Heynemann’s film adaptation of Alleg’s experiences proved to be almost as controversial and aroused so much anger from rightwing pressure groups that its distribution in France was curtailed.  France was not yet ready to face the truth of its shameful past in Algeria.

Jean-Luc Godard had previously broached the dirty subject of torture in Le Petit soldat (1963), which had initially been banned by the government censor.  Heynemann’s film is far more graphic than Godard’s (although nowhere near as graphic as what is described in Alleg’s book) and makes uncomfortable viewing, even today.  What makes the film particularly shocking is the detached, near-documentary style that Heynemann adopts for his film.  At no point does the spectator have the assurance that he is merely watching a simulated reconstruction.  The sparse mise-en-scène, the unpolished cinematography and understated performances create a potent sense that what we are watching is real, that the suffering we witness, glimpsed through Heynemann’s aggressively static objective camera, is genuine.   Heynemann has no need to underscore the drama with cinematographic gimmickry; all he has to do is replay what Alleg describes so vividly in his book; and the effect is chilling. 

Instead of well-known actors, Heynemann cast little-known performers on the strength of their ordinariness.  Jacques Denis is so perfect for the central part of Charlegue, so lacking in actor starriness, that you would not think he was an actor.   It is the ordinariness of Denis’s persona that makes it so easy for the spectator to identify with him, and therefore to receive the full horrific impact of the torture scenes (which include electrocution from a portable generator and near-asphyxiation by water torture).  The actors playing the soldiers who torment Charlegue have a similar everyman quality.  Far from being fiends, the torturers are well-rounded characters who have a sympathetic side, which perhaps makes it harder to comprehend their actions.  The one area of dramatic licence is the film’s portrayal of police officials and politicians - they are presented as weak, ineffective and totally out of touch, an easy caricature of the ineffectual leaders of the French Fourth Republic.

La Question is not so much an attack on the French military’s use of torture in Algeria as a cogent warning of the ease with which a supposedly civilised country can surrender its moral precepts and act in a way that makes it resemble a third world dictatorship.  Recently, the film has acquired a greater resonance in the light of the use of torture by the West in dealing with the threat of international terrorism.  The question we must ask ourselves is: do we accept that torture is a necessary evil or is it something that is so contrary to human dignity that it can never have a place in a mature democracy?  It is a question that western governments seem strangely reluctant to answer...

© James Travers 2012

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