Des Apaches (2015)
Directed by Nassim Amaouche

Film Review

Six years after making an impressive debut with his first feature Adieu Gary (2009), director Nassim Amaouche returns with an eagerly anticipated second film in which he himself plays the lead role.  The part was originally intended for Yasmine Belmadi, the principal actor of Amaouche's previous film, but Belmadi's tragic death in a road accident (just a few days before Adieu Gary's original French release in July 2009) put paid to this.  A palpable sense of mourning hangs over Des Apaches and whilst Belmadi is not visible on screen, his presence is felt, in Amaouche's committed and engaging performance.

If Adieu Gary was intended as a homage to the classic American western, its follow-up clearly owes much to the classic American gangster movie - Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990) being two obvious influences.  But rather than serve up a cold cuts pastiche, Amaouche uses this as just one of several ingredients in a thick bouillabaisse that offers a dark and ironic variation on the coming-of-age theme, in which a young drifter of immigrant stock is confronted with his North African origins.  The thriller tropes are intimately melded into a strange mix of social realism and nostalgic fantasy - the result is a film that is frustratingly difficult to get your head round and yet it acquits itself by virtue of its unconventional form and imaginative handling of familiar themes.  The film doesn't live up to the promise of its beginning, which practically serves as a documentary on the Kabyle community (Algerian immigrants) in modern day Paris, and as soon as Laetitia Casta shows up, giving a performance which is weak even by her standards, a fair chunk of the film's credibility goes straight out of the window.

The main problem with the film is that it doesn't quite manage to bring its disparate elements together into a coherent whole.  The fragments remain disconnected, and it is not hard to be discombobulated by the continual narrative jumping back and forth between the main character's supposedly happy past and his melancholic present (over-emphasised by the change of palette from warm hues to depressing grey tones).  The script is disappointing given that it was co-written by Amaouche with Guillaume Bréaud, who had garnered praise for his work on two previous films, Xavier Beauvois's Le Petit lieutenant (2005) and Pascale Ferran's Bird People (2014).  Des Apaches does not diminish Nassim Amaouche's potential as a serious filmmaker, but it lacks the impact and charm of his first feature.

Film Synopsis

Samir is a young man of Algerian origin who is coping badly with his mother's recent death.  At the funeral, his attention is drawn to a stranger, whom he soon discovers is his estranged father.  The latter has made a success of his life, running a thriving café in the Kabyle populated district of Belleville, but he now wants to sell up, and for that he will need Samir's help.  As memories of his past come back to haunt him, Samir is drawn into an unfamiliar world and an affair that will determine the course of his future life.  The time has come for Samir to put away his childhood and accept the responsibilities of adulthood...