AFF Update II - Bled Number One (Algiers)

Sunday night I watched the Algerian film Bled Number One. The film is very much in the spirit of cinéma vérité, the French movement of naturalism, the rough translation means "cinema of truth" or from the Russian progenitor of the movement 'kino-pravda'. I'm not sure if you would call this an absolute or true form of cinéma vérité, but it does have the feel of a documentary and a moment in time. An examination of the actors in the film reveals a few of them with extensive filmographies so it fails on that account. Enough of the sound scape is naturalistic when examined the sharp and contrasting sound scapes of Rodolph Burger's heavy and haunting guitar. Technicalities aside, lets get to talking about the film.

The narrative revolves around Kamel, an Algerian ex-pat who returns to a small village in Algeria following a stay in France. The film's quiet moments reflect perfectly the quite and still pond-like life of the village that seems to effortlessly revolve around the seasons and practices that are as old as the stones in the hills. A cow is brought to the village and slaughtered on film. The sight is graphic in all of its realisim, not for the faint of heart, but at the same time, the way that the animal is bled, hillel or kosheric in nature, is ancient and something we just don't see here in the west where it grows on supermarket shelves. After the cow is butchered all the meat is arranged in small piles on fresh cut leafy branches. The men of the village stand around this square and pray, wishing each other and people the world over good will and praise Allah. Each man then comes forward and takes one small pile of meat and puts it into a basket as his fair share of the sacrifice. Its a beautiful scene following the grizzly death of the cow on screen.

The communal harmony of the village doesn't seem to last long. Enter a young band of ruffians who begin to terrorize the villagers with a brand of radical Islam. They go into the local cafe and declare that playing dominos is a sin, to which one of the villagers replies: "look, we're all muslims, we're not rejecting Islam, but to each their own." The zealots are pushed out of the village and a guard post is erected at the road leading into the village following a meeting to mobilize the men of the village in defense of their way of life.

Now this egalitarianism is all well and good until Louisa arrives home and the darker side of this patriarchal society is shown. Louisa, as you later find out, has left her husband and taken their young boy Yanis. She has come home because she wants to sing American Jazz and Cabaret which goes against the wishes of her family. She is reprimanded by her Mother and urged to return to her husband. Louisa has a tired and half defeated look in her eyes as she listens to her Mothers chidding and her brother Bouzid looks on, dubious and plotting. Flash forward, Bouzid is stumbling through the hills with two cases of alcohol and the zealots catch up to him and threaten to cut off his head. For a moment you think theyr'e going to do it, but they eventually let him go. The next day Louisa's husband shows up to collect her and his child. Her husband spends the evenning in the local cafe drinking and chewing tchim which I can't seem to find the meaning of. At first I thought it was betelnut, but that's more of an Asian phenomenon, not so much African. In the cafe there are discussions of politics and what people are doing about their relative situations. There's no real animosity toward the west in the discussion, there is a kind of removal, an odd sort of objectavism that you don't expect to exist. Eventually Louisa and Yanis leave. Half way down the road Louisa's husband stops the car, steps out of it, throws her suitcase to the side of the road and then drags Louisa out of the car by her hair and takes off with the boy.

Here is where Louisa's troubles begin. For every insult that befalls her there is an injury waiting to happen. When she returns home late at night alone Bouzid, her brother, takes her to her room and proceeds to beat her bloody. She has shamed the family and he exacts a kind of revenge. The interesting parallel between this and the previous Moroccon picture, Heaven's Doors is the absence of a father in all of this. The brother is effectively running the household and distributes a kind of patriarchal justice, or at least has the final say in how things will happen. The sad fact of the matter is that Louisa is exercising her freedom of dissent with her spouse and this isn't tollerated. She is ostracized by her family, shunned by her husband's family and beaten for her insolance. The scene is difficult and provacative. After this incident she is taken to the local cleric for advice and told to put her faith in Allah that the husband will come back for her. She is also told to absolve her sins by allowing seven waves to lash her in the face and then to run around the mosque seven times.

As effective outsiders, Louisa and Kamel share a strange attraction. Kamel calls Bouzid on his brutality and accuses him with a Western air of righteousness of not being a man for beating his sister. You get the sense that tragedy rolls down hill like shit and that his castration at the hands of the ruffians is ultimately paid for by Louisa. Nothing can console Louisa at the loss of her child so she leaves the village for the city and her Husband's family who tells her he has taken the child and throws her out of her own home. She is distraught, attempts suicide by jumping off a bridge and is stopped and taken to a mental institution that resembles more of a battered women's shelter than anything else. The occupants are all women, or at least we're not shown the male ward, but you get the feeling that they are all there for the same exact reason. The images and deft cinematography is reminscent of Diane Arbus's photographs from mental instituions that are simply numbered, denying her subjects a kind of human dignity in terms of a name as they jostle through the black and white images in their stark white robes in their role as patient and subject. Louisa stages a concert at the institution in a long black evenning dress contrasting the gowns most of the audience is wearing in a rather touching scene that is as odd as it is surreal. This performance is juxtaposed with two strange scenes of Rudolph Berger sitting on a hillside with an electric guitar plugged into an amp and Kamel wandering around, playing music that is the soundtrack. These two scenes come in pivotal moments in the film, one in the middle and then the very last scene after Kamel decides that he's in love with Louisa, who is now gone, and that he has to leave the village and will go so far as sneaking into Tunisia, as he's going mad and his sense of democracy and women's rights is completely at odds with the accepted pace of village life. It is Rudolph's guitar that closes out the film with a haunting melody. You never quite find out what happens to Louisa, or Kamel for that matter, and the guitar so much reminds you of Wes Anderson's inclusion of guitar players singing and "scoring" the film as part of the film that you're left to wonder if that wasn't possibly borrowed, but its effective and quixotic in its import and placement throughout the film.

All in all, a very good film, difficult to watch at times, but very good... a slice of time and life in a place that none of us will ever visit but impossible to forget even on celluloid.