The Casbah during the French occupation of Algeria, 1 9 5 4. Ali La Pointe is an Arab lad who joins the National Liberation Front (FNL), an underground organization that wants Algeria to gain independence. The FNL performs several assassinations against French soldiers and police officers, which in turn causes the French police to seal off the Casbah with barbed wire. A French man places a bomb in an Arab neighborhood during the night, causing several dead civilians. The FNL replies by having three Arab women put bombs in cafes, killing a lot of French civilians. These guerilla tactics go back and forth, until the French bring in Colonel Mathieu who starts arresting and torturing the commanders of the FNL. In the end, they manage to find La Pointe in an apartment and blow him up. However, after two years of calm, Algerians start mass demonstrations—until Algeria gains independence from France in '62.
One of the classics of the 20th century cinema, a thoroughbred masterpiece, "The Battle of Algiers" is a raw, yet very energetic experience that slowly, but steadily builds up its intrigue factor as time goes by. While preparing for the film adaptation of one of several decolonization events of the 20th century, the Algerian War of Independence, in which over 200,000 people were killed, Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo refused to make a nationalistic epic with black-and-white characters, as was the case with "Braveheart", and instead wisely chose to make an unbiased, concise, cold, and as objective as possible portrait of the independence movement, filming on authentic locations, employing non-professional actors who speak in French and Arabic, as well as giving room for both sides—brutalities of both sides are shown, and even the French are not shown as typical bad guys, since some of their officials themselves denounce violence by their own troops, yet do not know how to cope with all the chaos in Colonial Algeria—which gives the movie an almost documentary feel at times. Some scenes seem staged (when shot, people do not bleed, but just spasmodically drop on the floor) and there is no deeper character development or a main protagonist, since historicity and universal observation of an event is more important than the (episodic) characters, yet Pontecorvo still manages to compensate for said two omissions thanks to several virtuoso directed moments which trigger a momentum.
One of them is the first series of FNL attack against French colonial police, with unsettling creativity: a street vendor lifts lettuce from his box, an Arab lad takes a gun from it, shoots a French policeman in the back, returns the gun inside the box and flees; a French policeman searches another Arab lad, doesn't find anything suspicious, but said lad then walks, picks up a gun hidden in a garbage can, shoots the policeman and runs away. Another is the almost 10-minute long sequence where three Algerian women rearrange their hair and wear modern clothes to pose as French, pass a checkpoint—and leave baskets with bombs inside a cafe, a disco and airport before leaving, after which the bombs explode and kill dozens of French civilians. When later on asked by a reporter how to justify these terrorist methods, FNL commander Ben M'Hidi gives an legendary quote: "If we had your war planes, it would be a lot easier for us. Gives us your bombers, gentlemen, and you can have our baskets." There are many other highly authentic scenes (the bomb explosion at the stadium during a horse race, which happens in the same shot with the actors (!); the French soldiers slapping Algerians into opening their shops to stop the FNL 8-day strike, only to later give bread to the people in order to try to win their hearts and minds...), showing Algerian resistance movement resorting to terrorism, but also the other side, the crackdown by the French Army (even Colonel Mathieu poses a rhetorical question: "Should we remain in Algeria? If you answer "yes," then you must accept all the necessary consequences"), which chronicles this 'war of atrocities', capturing some sort of an universal history lesson about the world (the strong oppressing the weak; one group trying to dominate over another one; the unavoidable savagery and primitivism of war; the stray means desperate use to achieve their goal...) which gives "Algiers" a timeless feel and indestructible power.
Grade:++++
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