2023-06-08 18:02:02
Par Toulouse editorial staff
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The first featureElias Belkeddar is above all a moving declaration of love to Algeria, and to its capital in particular. Never indeed this city will have deserved as much as in this film the name of Algiers the white.
A duo of broken arms
Deftly, the director slides his camera from the blinding roofs of the city to the azure of the Mediterranean. It is also a way of filming the sea as a border, even an obstacle… In fact, the scenario presents us a duo of broken arms quite colorful. There is Omar (Reda Kateb as usual with imperial sensibility), it is for him that the Mediterranean is a border not to be crossed.
A Parisian gangster, he fled France to escape prison. Justice has just sentenced him in absentia to 20 years. Roger (Benoit Magimel), his brother of multiple entanglements and unfailing friendship, followed him. He’s his guardian angel because if Omar gets caught by the Algerian police, he’s the direct gnouf.
Nostalgia for a country that saw him born
Despite the luxurious villa that shelters them, even if the swimming pool is dry, you have to live well and show that you are on the right track. A friend finds him a job in security at an industrial biscuit factory run by Samia (Meriem Amiar, the revelation of the film, luminous, captivating).
All of this serves as decorum for another film, the one that speaks of Omar’s nostalgia for a country where he was born, France, for another in which he has his roots, Algeria, for this inability to him to appropriate his secular origins. Elias Belkeddar, through literally sumptuous lights, draws us the portrait of various characters.
The brothers, lost in their lives, the young Algerians already lost in their future, Samia, determined and committed to more constructive perspectives, all this in a skilful combination of irresistible comedy and…unbearable violence. Such is the vision of the director.
An ambitious film certainly, perhaps not quite successful but carrying a strange and sulphurous fascination.
Robert Pénavayre
Omar the Strawberry, by Elias Belkeddar
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