Bled Number One

This movie was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Festival 2006. Kamel is a French-Algerian who is deported back to Algeria straight after being released from prison. Kamel is a lonely soul who suddenly gets caught in the middle of an Algerian society undergoing a fundamental change. His cousin Bouzid was found drunk and beaten to near death by a group of local Islamists who impose their belief on the villagers. Kamel's other cousin Louisa leaves her husband and comes to her parent's house, she wants to sing but her husband refuses to let her, he beats her and kidnaps their son. Kamel and Louisa connect in a strange way but their relationship never takes off. Kamel joins a small militia determined to put the violent Islamists in their place while Louisa embarks on a journey to find her son.

The movie tackles some ancient traditions where much is decided by the village's gossip rather than any other logic. It also shows the desire of some people to break free of those rules and the reality of being a women in such a society.

The movie style seems to be between a documentary and a film and never goes deep enough into the analysis of those restrictive traditions nor does it explain those events through dialogue. Most of what you learn is through the silence of the characters and by observing their gestures.

I think it is was not deep enough, it just touches the surfaces of the Algerian society, too much time spent on certain scenes where only few minutes would have been enough to understand the situation.

Even if the cinema is discovered more than a century ago, the director of this film shots today in a, so to say, genuine style (we could say à la Lumière), that is disregarding any authorial input, getting rid of any drama rules, collapsing the dialogs and then just standing discreetly in front of (apparently) «nothing happens». A very acute authenticity rises then, in this non-interventionist way of filming which provide some beautiful portraits (in gros-plan) and a collection of «bricks» of pure (inner) time. The movie is supposed to be charming and original in giving us all freedom to see these bricks together in a virtual composition. But this is a little bit too virtual even if I appreciate this particular way of being «cool» by letting the story to tell (or to lose) itself. A story about Algeria, about the schizoid life with strong traditions placed in the horizon of the largely spread emigration in France. The film let us ask ourselves if the ingenuousness has been really lost in cinema.