6/10

Exils : France 2004 : Tony GATLIF : 104 mins

• First shot is best: the body, a slow zoom, a window. Music pounding: "Injustice! Dictatorship! Terrorism! Upheaval!"

• Topical, timely, sensitive.
• Unfolds at idiosyncratic pace dictated not by usual screenwriting concerns but by rhythms of director's own moods, music.
• Role of editor crucial: Monique Dartonne is she.
• Peaks and troughs: energy bursts and saggy dips.
• Shaggily amiable picaresque roadmovie.
• Their impulsive flight south in search of roots / identity. Algeria is destination.
• Contracorrente: Africans moving north to Europe. Against the flow.
• Travellers and returners. Lingua franca: dance.
• Easy-on-the-eye couple: him - foxfaced, triblied ex-musician, vulpine grins. "I never touched the violin again." But propelled by music. Her - Naima - "I'm a stranger everywhere"
• Folks encountered: wealth and generosity/friendliness in inverse proportions. Penniless give all.
• Whitmanistic yawp, celebration of life.
• Heat, dust, crowds, post-quake rubble.
• He walks across a square, kicking bottles, their tinkling music, a grace note.
• Songs and dances and the drop of a trilby. Music is all around.
• More conventional plot developments don't work so well: her roving eye, impulsive infidelity.
• Anachronistic, romantic, freespirited air.
• Somewhat underpowered... Gatlif's own style not quite so free and impulsive as that which he celebrates.
• "My religion's music."
• Worthy air... cultural fusions. Handy nothing's been touched in his family's old house.
• Penultimate scene a frenzy of dervish-like dancing: beyond acting, beyond cinema. Audaciously extended take. "You must refind yourself". Wild, exorcism-like vitus dance.
• Coda. Bathos. Walkman on gravestone, she peels an orange.
• The pulse of life, q.ch. comme ca.

6th December, 2004

[seen 5th November : Ster Century, Leeds : public show : Leeds Film Festival]

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