Algerian filmmaker Merzak Allouache's Les Terasses was screened at the end of the 70th Venice Film Festival, a strategic choice for what was undoubtedly one of the events of this round. The film is timely, what is more, since the whole world is following the rise of political Islam after the fall of dictatorships in much of the Arab world, following the crimes committed in the name of Islam from Egypt and Libya to Yemen and Syria. The world also remembers Algeria in the 1990s, when political Islam — having won the elections — was barred from power by the army, giving rise to “the Black Decade” during which over 100 thousand Algerians were killed. When the gunmen approached an area, it is said, they would cry, La hayy fil hayy (“No living soul in the district”). Les Terasses is the 12th feature film by Allouache, since Omar Gatlato in 1976: a turning point in the history of Algerian cinema after it was restricted to films on the liberation war following independence in 1962. Allouache moved to Paris and directed films on French topics but he never forgot his identity or stopped expressing Algerian concerns. No such concern has been greater than that of political Islam since the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979. Allouache did deal with the topic before, notably in The Repentant, which was screened in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival last year. The present film is different from The Repentant, however, in that it does not deal with the violence practised by Islamist groups, which they justify through certain interpretations of Quranic verses but rather with the society and environment that result in the emergence of such groups in Algeria. The action takes place on the roofs of five buildings in neighbouring quarters of Algiers in the course of a single day from the dawn to the evening prayer, with the names of the neighbourhoods and an explanation of the Muslims' five daily prayers appearing in subtitles on the screen. General views of the city accompany the call to prayers at the start and the end of the film, which thus preserves Aristotle's unities of time, place and subject. This is a work that has classical forms but employs a modern style to deal with a political subject, even if it deals with politics through society rather than through the political sphere as such. On the roofs the viewer follows five separate stories progressing along parallel lines. In a building under construction, for example, one person is torturing another with the help of two people, trying to make him sign a document before letting him return to his wife and children in Bordeaux. The victim dies under torture and it becomes clear that he is the torturer's brother, but it is not clear what the document he is being forced to sign is about; the chances are it is a requisition of a shared inheritance. In the course of the torture session a female director, a cameraman and a sound engineer enter the building to film from the roof — and all three are killed in cold blood. The second story, on the other hand, is about a woman suffering from her son's addiction to drugs and her niece's condition: she is silent throughout, seeming unaware of what is going on around her. When the landowner comes in to evict them the young man has a fight with him and the girl ends up killing him. The landowner's son asks after his father, and informs the police. A policeman arrives and it becomes clear from the ensuing conversation that he used to be a communist and that the niece came over from Oran where she became pregnant and had to run away. In the end the policeman tells the mother to dump the corpse in the sea, saying the landowner deserved to die. And so it continues: it is a completely dark world without the least glimmer of hope. Formally tight, with a sound structure, the script — also written by Allouache — fails to show fully fledged characters or dramatically rich personas that can come across as convincing human beings. This is due to the intellectual nature of the whole endeavour, with the artist presenting ideas in human form rather than characters, linking between this dark inhumane world and the five daily prayers — as if the behaviour of the characters results from them being Muslims. A somewhat objectionable viewpoint...
