Là-bas... mon pays (2000) - film review

French television journalist Pierre Nivel is surprised when, out of the blue, he receives a phone call from an Algerian woman he has not seen for thirty years.  It was during the war of independence that Pierre and his parents decided to leave Algeria and settle in France, putting an end to Pierre’s adolescent love affair with a girl named Leïla, who chose to stay behind.   Now, three decades on, Leïla is imploring Pierre to return to Algeria to help her in a period of crisis.  Though his life may be in jeopardy, Pierre realises he has no choice but to return to the country where he was born.  To his surprise, on his arrival Leïla refuses to see him.  Instead, she leaves him a message begging him to take her daughter to France so that she can avoid being coerced into marrying a gun-toting fundamentalist.  Recalling what Leïla  once meant to him, Pierre feels compelled to carry out her wishes, but getting her daughter out of Algeria proves to be no easy task...

Like a treasured young nephew who has yet to discover the virtues of soap and water and whose taste in music serves merely to awaken an implausible appreciation for Stockhausen, Là-bas... mon pays is one of those strangely seductive films that you feel you should love but somehow you just can’t quite manage it.  It may engage the emotions, arouse the senses and tickle the intellect, but its over-earnestness and tendency for caricature do invite a certain amount of covert toe curling.

The film is not all bad – in fact, this is one of Alexandre Arcady’s better films, lacking the stylistic excesses, unconvincing performances and flimsy dramatisation that have been so evident in much of his work to date (none of which seems to have dented his popularity in France).   For one thing, it is extremely well photographed, in a way that clearly delineates between the present and the past (shown in flashbacks), making the narrative easier to follow than might have been the case.  The panoramic shots of the Algerian capital and the surrounding countryside are stunningly beautiful and, along with the evocative soundtrack, capture the essence of a country that still evokes a palpable sense of the exotic.

The biggest surprise the film has to offer an unsuspecting audience is a sensitive well-judged performance from Antoine de Caunes.  The onetime presenter of Eurotrash brings a welcome tone of sombre introspection to offset some of the film’s melodramatic excesses.  Another actor who defies our expectations is Samy Naceri, whose restrained character performance in this film makes an astonishing contrast with the ebullient persona seen in the Taxi films.

Là-bas... mon pays offers a sobering portrait of a country that, thirty years after it achieved independence from France, is still ill at ease with itself and is riven by religious and political conflict, reeling from wounds that refuse to heal.  You can feel something of the anguish, the despair and the desperation of the Algerian people through this film, but, alas, this merely serves as background colour for an unsatisfactory piece of melodrama which is perhaps just a little too predictable.

© filmsdefrance.com 2008

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