BAB EL-OUED CITY (1994, Algeria, 93 min.), directed by Merzak Allouache; screenplay by Merzak Allouache; cinematography by Jean-Jacques Mréjen; music by Rachid Bahr; edited by Marie Colonna; with Hassan Abdou (Boualem), Mohamed Ourdache (Said), Nadia Kaei (Yamina), Mabrouk Ait Amara (Mabrouk), Messaoud Hattau (Mess) Nadia Samir (Ouardya); Mourad Khen (Rachid). In Arabic with English subtitles.

The violence in Algeria is not Algeria's alone. It is a drama with an international dimension. One has the impression that it is a violence that marks the end of our century. --Merzak Allouache

Bab el-Oued City opens with a young woman writing a letter to her lover. It has been three years since he left her and promised to send for her. Who is he? How did he come to leave? We quickly move into an extended flashback, which will be the narrative of this film.

Young Boualem just wants a little quiet, a little space to be himself and follow his desires. He works six nights a week at a French bakery in the impoverished section of Algiers known as Bab el-Oued, and then returns to his room to sink into well-earned sleep. However, right on the rooftop of his apartment building is a loudspeaker from the local mosque, incessantly blaring out admonitions and condemnations in a pounding, mind-numbing monotone. It is a North African version of 1984 and Big Brother. Finally, Boualem can take it no more. In a fit of madness, he tears down the loudspeaker and throws it into the sea. Boualem is quickly filled with guilt and apprehension for what he has done. He is a decent young man and a believer, and desecrating the property of the mosque is a sin.. But more than that, he quickly finds himself the quarry of a relentless pursuit.

The setting of the film is shortly after the bloody riots of October 1988, which led to the rejection of socialism and provoked a renascent Islamic fundamentalism, under the guise of the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut; FIS). To members of the religious right, the theft of the loudspeaker would be seen as a personal affront, an attempt to silence them and mock their growing authority. A group of young Islamic fundamentalist thugs has therefore made it their personal crusade (as in "hadj") to find the sinner and see that he is severely punished. They roam the quarter in a pack, clad in black, nosing around for signs of "impurity" and weakness, bothering and bullying any who get in their way. One of them speaks longingly of the day soon to come when weapons will come to Algiers, and the rule of the Koran imposed on the decadent population. They see themselves as leading players on the stage of religious history: when we first see their leader, Said, he is applying make-up to his eyes, as he prepares for his daily incursion into the neighborhood, in an effort to make himself appear more charismatic and dominating.

Said seizes the opportunity of the stolen loudspeaker to terrorize and victimize the neighborhood, scattering suspicions on all, until people are willing to do just about anything to get him off their backs. We eventually realize that he is receiving his orders from a mysterious man in a BMW, whom the camera follows at various points in the film, and who is never identified. (Is he part of the government? a foreign operative? a member of the Algerian "mafia"? Allouache deliberately keeps him ambiguous and unknowable.) Said and his fundamentalist posse, we come to understand, are pawns in a much larger enterprise, which will bring fundamental(ist) change to the once casual and life-affirming world of Bab el-Oued (and Algeria in general).

Said lives with his younger sister, Yamina, whom he brutalizes and suppresses. Kept a virtual prisoner at home, her body and hair concealed by robes and scarves, Yamina, like Boualem, longs for freedom, for fresh air and the opportunity to live her own life. She spends hours at her window (and her brother will berate her for that), her only real contact with the outside world. She is also in love with Boualem, and he with her, a love that transforms her. The two lovers meet surreptitiously in a cemetery, ironically the only place where, in Boualem's words, one can find a bit of solitude and freedom There, in a moment charged with a chaste eroticism, Yamina removes her scarf and shows Boualem her hair. Unfortunately, the two are observed by Said's lieutenant, which will make Boualem doubly the object of Said's violent attentions, and increase Boualem's paranoia and claustrophobia.

Indeed, despite its lovely Mediterranean setting, the film is full of an atmosphere of paranoia, claustrophobia, repressed violence, and a longing to escape. Generally, this longing becomes a desire to leave Algeria and live in France, where one can presumably live one's own life. This is particularly true of Boualem's chubby work-mate, Mabrouk, who in his off-hours roams the quarter with his baseball cap and headphones on, working the black market, trying to buy himself a ticket to freedom. But it is also true of Mess, a young Algerian raised in France, who finds himself stuck in Algeria and sucked into Said's gang. This same desire to escape can be seen in Ouardya, a woman who came to Algeria drawn to its revolutionary and socialist ideals, but has had to watch helplessly as those ideals dribbled away into compromise, corruption, and now fundamentalism; rather than leave the country, though, her means to escape will be alcohol. All of these forces, examples, and pressures will lead Boualem ultimately to leave for France himself, where he will presumably send for Yamina to join him. However, as we know from the film's frame story, Yamina is still waiting and longing to depart.

For the director, there is a reverse kind of longing here. One senses a feeling of nostalgia for a lost homeland, a lost period of time, the last moment of relative peace and hope, by a director who has already been forced to flee. We have wonderful scenes of women hanging out in "their" world--the rooftops--where they can be free of their veils and inhibitions. There is a sense of familiarity and vitality about them, and about a number of other shots of Algiers. As Allouache himself has said, his cinema is filled with a love of the everyday, a tenderness for the familiar.

The filmmaker manages not only to show this sense of yearning and nostalgia, and this atmosphere of a society on the verge of slipping into something very terrible, but he also mounts a complex portrait of the religious right that is manipulating the situation for selfish ends. The compassionate, humanitarian neighborhood cleric can do little to stop the tide of violence, and he knows it. Although their critique of the status quo and government incompetence has merit, the young fundamentalists reveal themselves to be rife with hypocrisy and a mad fascination with power. In characters like Rachid and Said, we can see the eventual transition of fundamentalism from the non-violent Islamic Salvation Front (FSI) to the terror of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA). After the government refused to hold elections that the FSI was certain to win, the low-level violence that we see in this film exploded into terror. GIA bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations--and the government's attempt to counter them-- would ultimately be responsible for the loss of over 50,000 lives in Algeria, including many journalists, artists, and intellectuals.

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 also set in Bab el-Oued. Other films include 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." For the moment, he has no alternative.

Notes by Michael Dembrow

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