R.A.S. (1973) - film review

In 1956, France’s professional army lacks the manpower to keep the peace in Algeria, the colony which the country is determined to hold onto at any price.   For this reason, reservists are called up and subject to an intense period of training before being sent to the front.  Rémy March, Alain Charpentier and Raymond Dax are three such young men who have no interest in the military escapade and are reluctant conscripts.  What they witness in Algeria will appal and transform them.  Rape, torture, executions... there is no end to the atrocities in which they become unwilling participants.  No wonder the French military are so willing to proclaim that there is nothing to report...

The Algerian War has long been a taboo subject in France.   The war wasn’t even recognised as such by the French state until 1999 and all attempts to represent it in cinema were vehemently opposed by the military and the government for well over a decade after Algeria gained independence in 1962.  Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit soldat (1963) was banned and could not be shown in France until the war had ended.  Ten years later, director René Vautier had to resort to a hunger strike to obtain a distribution visa for his film Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès (1972).  When Yves Boisset, an established agent provocateur, set about making a film about the Algerian conflict, it was inevitable that the Powers That Be would do everything within their power to stop him.  And they almost succeeded.

Yves Boisset was a live wire and the French army had good reason to be concerned about what he might reveal in his film.  The director had just made a film, L’Attentat, about the controversial Ben Barka affair, in which it was implied that the French state actively colluded with Israel intelligence agents in the abduction and killing of a prominent Moroccan politician.  Boisset’s attempts to raise funding for his Algeria War exposé were thwarted on three separate occasions, and once he had obtained the financial wherewithal to make the film the military did everything within its power to oppose him.  Boisset was refused access to barracks, pressure was put on costume suppliers not to loan him combat uniforms (forcing him to make use of Belgian uniforms), and the Algerian government had its arms twisted by France to forbid the film from being shot in Algeria (it was instead filmed in Tunisia).  Once the location filming had been completed, some reels of film mysteriously went missing (one just happened to contain a torture scene), forcing the director to re-shoot several sequences.

Although the government censor allowed the film to be released (probably through fear that an outright ban would merely serve Boisset’s case and raise the film’s profile), several cuts were insisted upon and it was issued with an over-16 certificate.  Even though the Algerian War was still a painful subject for the French people, R.A.S. proved to be a huge commercial success and attracted 1.3 million spectators.  As expected, the film was ill-received in some quarters.  Several towns banned the film, whilst in others screenings were disrupted by rightwing demonstrators and even grenade attacks.  One of the most provocative and controversial French films of the decade, R.A.S. is very rarely screened on French television and has so far not been released on DVD - an indication perhaps that the old wounds have still yet to heal.

The film’s title - an allusion to Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H. (1970) - is an acronym for Rien à signaler, meaning Nothing to report.  Based on firsthand experiences of Algerian War veterans, the film is a shocking indictment of the methods employed by the French military in its campaign of pacification in Algeria between 1954 and 1962.  The aptness of the title soon becomes apparent - if the French public had known that the military had resorted to torture, rape and summary execution to achieve its aims, support for the campaign would have crumbled a lot faster than it did.  Boisset has often been criticised for resorting to shock tactics in his films and of having a strong political bias.  In R.A.S., his most uncompromising film, his provocative approach has been entirely vindicated and the film is now considered one of the most authentic portrayals of the French side of the Algerian conflict.

Recent films like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) have practically inured us to the horrors of modern warfare, but whilst R.A.S. is less viscerally shocking than today’s war films, it still manages to be a pretty gruelling viewing experience.  It is not a film that you will forget in a hurry.  Its first half focuses on the brutal indoctrination (‘training’ would be too grand a word) of a batch of wet-behind-the-ears reservists into the ways of the military.   As they are driven to the limits of physical and mental endurance by a sadistic adjutant with obvious psychopathic tendencies, it is not surprising that some of them go completely off the rails.  Then, after this gentle softening up, come the real shocks - a relentless catalogue of bestial atrocities intended to put the Algerian people in their place.  Watching this spectacle of subjugation and humiliation is like being repeatedly beaten in the face, and it is a struggle to get through it without being physically sick.  Florent Emilio Siri’s more recent film on the Algerian War, L’Ennemi intime (2007), is far more graphic in its depiction of violence, but it feels tame compared with what R.A.S. presents, mainly because Boisset employs a far more restrained, matter-of-fact style of film reportage.

The absence of established actors in the cast adds to the film’s authentic, near-documentary feel.  There may be no big guns in the castlist but there is no shortage of acting talent, and many members of the cast (Jacques Spiesser, Jacques Weber, Jean-François Balmer, Claude Brosset and Roland Blanche) would go on to become very familiar faces in French cinema.  This is the film in which Jacques Villeret made his screen debut, his amiable persona bringing a badly needed dose of humanity to offset the crushing inhumanity of the film’s subject.  What makes the film so effective is the way in which Boisset compels us to identify with the three main characters, forcing us to see the atrocities through their uncomprehending eyes, just as Lewis Milestone had done in his anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).  It is not the violence that is so shocking, but rather the total lack of moral awareness in the way the military conducts its operations.  War crimes are committed with blithe insouciance and then routinely swept under the carpet by those who know they can absolve themselves by intoning those three magic letters: R.A.S.  It has been fifty years since Algeria gained its hard-won independence, but you sense that France still remains in denial over its last great colonial adventure.  Boisset’s film, along with more recent accounts of the war, provide not only a valuable historical testimony but also play a part in the healing process, to help France come to terms with what is still referred to as la Guerre sans nom, the war without a name.

© filmsdefrance.com 2012

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