THE OTHER WORLD/L’AUTRE MONDE (2001, Algeria, 95 min.), directed by Merzak Allouache; screenplay by Merzak Allouache; cinematography by George Lechaptois and François Kuhnel; music by Gnawa Diffusion; edited by Sylvie Gadmer; with Marie Brahimi (Yasmine), Karim Bouaiche (Hakim), Nazim Boudjenah (Rachid), Michèle Moretti (Aldjia), Abdelkrim Bahloul (The Officer), Amel Himour (His wife), Boualem Bennani (Omar). In French and Algerian with English subtitles.

What particularly surprised me in Algiers, while I was putting the finishing touches to the script, was that no one seemed to want to speak about what was happening less than fifty kilometers from the capital. I also had the impression that amnesia had taken hold, and all those who had died were slowly being forgotten. – Merzak Allouache

A woman searches for her lover, lost in the turmoil of war. In her search for him, she is taken out of the world that is familiar to her, the boundaries in which she feels comfortable, and she is tested in ways that reveal new realities, about herself and about this other world that exists alongside hers. It is in some ways a familiar story, this story of a woman’s search for her man, her refusal to give him up to the vagaries of history. (Sarah Maldoror’s seminal film from Angola, Sambizanga, comes immediately to mind, as does Flora Gomes lovely Mortu Nega from Guinea-Buissau, but they are not alone.)

Here, in this latest feature film by Merzak Allouache (Salut Cousin, Bab el-Oued City), this search takes place against the horror and confusion of the Algerian terror of the 1990s.

The film begins in Paris at the end of December 1999, amidst the festive lights of the holiday season. Western classical choral music plays on the soundtrack. Yasmine, a law student of Algerian extraction, is seen shopping for a djellabah and hidjab (the long, severe gown and scarf worn by traditional Algerian women), which she wears back to her apartment. She has not in fact undergone a religious conversion; rather, she is preparing her armor for a trip to Algeria, a land where—the media tells us—religious extremists hold the people in their terrorist grip. This, she will learn, is both true and not quite true.

The reason for her descent into this dangerous world is that she has lost contact with her lover, Rachid, and needs to find out what has happened to him. He had left her without warning, and the next she knew he was in the Algerian military. (He had, we eventually learned, undergone some kind of identity crisis and had returned to the land of his birth, only to be conscripted immediately.)

After an uneventful flight, seated next to an Algerian man who will reappear a couple of times over the course of the film, Yasmine is seen writing away in her journal (which she will do throughout the film, though the exact nature of her writing will remain a mystery). Her initial encounter with Algiers is disorienting—we realize that she neither speaks nor understands Arabic—but soon gives way to comfort and familiarity, as she is reunited with her very Westernized uncle and his daughter. (He makes her take off her djellabah immediately, for he has no patience for veils or beards or any of that.) With her cousin, she wanders the port and Westernized sections of Algiers; she could easily be in Marseilles or some other city in the south of France. There used to be bombings, her cousin tells her, but that’s over now. The young woman is blasé and cynical about the Algerian experience. At one time, at the height of the terror, she had been active in a woman’s group, but now she just wants to smoke a couple of joints, wander along the seawall, and forget about Algeria’s various double-standards. (“You do what you want in this country—as long as no one sees you.”) Regarding the terror, the country has slipped into a kind of amnesia, she says. Still, when Yasmine confesses her plan to go to the provinces to search for Rachid, her cousin reacts with horror.

And indeed it is a different world in the provinces. In the provincial capital, things also appear “normal,” but there is a pervasive nervousness, and security is tight. Yasmine meets an army officer, who tells her that Rachid’s entire unit had been wiped out in an ambush massacre, but he was one of two soldiers whose bodies were never found. Refusing to believe that he is dead, Yasmine resolves to go to the rural scene of the massacre and search for him, despite her inability to speak Arabic, despite the fact that extremist bands still roam the hills.

With a kind of numbing inevitability, our heroine is taken prisoner while en route to that location, by one of those bands—a group of well-armed young fundamentalists, led by their so-called “Emir.” If there was ever a purpose to their activities, it is long since in the past; they are caught up in a self-perpetuating cycle of murder, self-defense, abuse, and terror, actions for which—one of them later confesses—Allah will never forgive them. With the luck of the charmed innocent that she is, though, Yasmine is somehow able to free herself, and she now has a protector: Hakim, the terrorist who has betrayed his comrades to help her escape. Their fates will henceforth be strangely intertwined. He is there to watch over her, to protect her, he says . . .but who will protect her from him?

Yasmine’s determination does eventually pay off, though not exactly as she had dreamed. She winds up in the most bizarre of locations, living in a ramshackle whorehouse run by a blind madame on the edge of the Algerian desert. Here she tries to rebuild her life, while we wait with trepidation for the Emir or one of his cronies to descend upon them and put an end to it all. But in the end their fates will be sealed by another source, as, on the first day of the new millennium, The Other World resolves itself in a mixture of tragedy, ecstasy, and a sad inevitability.

* * *

One of Algeria’s leading directors, Merzak Allouache was born in Algiers in 1944. He studied filmmaking at Paris' celebrated IDHEC, then went on to make a series of feature films, documentaries, and television programs. Omar Gatlato (1976), his first feature film, was set in the traditional Bab el-Oued quarter of Algiers. Other films included Adventures of a Hero/Aventures d'un heros (1978), The Man Who Watched Windows/L'Homme qui regardait les fenêtres (1982), and A Love in Paris/Un amour à Paris (1988). In 1989 he made Following October/L'après-octobre, a documentary dealing with the riots of 1988.

By the time he began shooting Bab el-Oued City in 1993, the terror was already gripping Algeria. During the shooting, his friend, the novelist and journalist Tahar Djaout, was murdered. Although gripped by a sense of futility, and despite the danger, Allouache pressed on and completed the filming. However, Allouache was forced to make the film on the run, and could not return to Islamist sections like the Casbah for second takes. ."You had to get it right the first time--and fast," he told an interviewer. He later published the story of Bab el-Oued City as a novel, including some of the scenes that he was unable to get into the film because of the logistical constraints. Despite these difficulties, Bab el-Oued City turned out to be a huge critical success, winning the International Critics' Prize at Cannes in 1994, and the grand prize at the 1994 Arab Film Festival in Paris. In 1995, he was asked to participate in the international compilation film that was a tribute to the founders of cinema, Lumière et Compagnie.

For his 1996 film, Salut Cousin! he turned to comedy as a way of dealing with the situation of an Algerian living in Parisian exile (as he himself now was). The film was an international popular success. His most recent film is Alger-Beyrouth: Pour Mémoire/Alger-Beirut, A Souvenir (1998), another opportunity for Allouache to make an "Algerian film without really needing to go there."

By 1999, however, events had changed sufficiently for him to return to Algiers to prepare and ultimately make The Other World. He wanted to make a film with dramatic power, one which captured the feeling of a time that people in Algiers were already struggling to forget. In Yasmine he was able to create an innocent through whose eyes we vicariously experience the confusion, glimpses of humanity, and sudden terror of the recent Algerian experience; in her relentless determination, he also found a way, in his words, “to pay homage to the Algerian women whose courage was without limit during those leaden years.”

--Notes by Michael Dembrow

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