What a moving portrayal of the human struggle, and the very real costs of that struggle, that occurs for so many today as the result of the cultural schizophrenia in places like Algiers and throughout the Muslim world. Just as so many of the economic and technological benefits of Western culture have begun to penetrate these countries enough to affect the daily lives of most people, radical Islamists enter the scene en force as a reaction against the political ideas and social freedoms that so many also wish to participate in. And much of the ordinary population is caught up in the confusing and dangerous middle ground.
Each of the four primary female characters in this film embody the split personality that *is* the Muslim world today. Each one navigating between desires and ambitions born from her sense that it is permissible to dream of freedom and happiness--however that is symbolically represented for her in her visions of a self-defined destiny...............yet each also struggles against the curbs placed on that freedom and self-determination by the culturally-shrinking society that surrounds her.
In the film this is wonderfully portrayed in the stark difference between the public and the private spaces in which the characters function. This is most obvious in the costuming, as the women cover themselves completely whenever they go "out" (ironically, making them anything but "out") and uncover when they are inside. But this difference is also portrayed in the interaction between the main characters themselves, as though the traditional clothing in which they are hidden also creates a wall between them--and it is only inside, when they have taken off those coverings, that they can relate on an intimate level.
There are crucial - and painful - moments of crisis in the film when these separations break down: bringing the psychic walls of coveredness into the private realm, or being exposed and uncovered in the public realm. And in these moments, we see that things start to break down in the lives of the characters. This also is a continuation of the metaphor: for those living in the schizophrenia of the Muslim world today, who attempt individually and societally to simply put the modern Western world in one compartment and the tug of Islamist fundamentalism in another, who attempt to simply switch costumes while going from one to the other -- such a way of living, such a way of being eventually has to break down.
The film does not attempt to resolve this problem, but merely to set it before us. On the way to its conclusion there is great tragedy, minor redemption, and a possibility of some vague hope. Let us also, as the audience, dare to posses some hope for a future resolution in the Muslim world.....one that does not take such a toll on the women who live their lives within it.
