Cyril Collard | Alger la blanche (White Algiers) / 1986

secret lovers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cyril Collard and Jean-Marie Guillaume (screenplay), Cyril Collard (director) Alger la blanche (White Algiers) / 1986

 

French director Collard died of AIDS in 1993, three days before winning four César awards for Savage Nights. But by that time, he had already written other books and made short films that revealed his sensitivity to the immense pulls of cultural, sexual, and social differences.

     The central character in his 1986 short Alger la blanche, Farid (Ali Baouche) is a teenager of Algerian descent, a bisexual in love with a young French illustrator Jean (Frédéric Deban), and a boy torn between growing up in the wild suburbs of immigrant France and his own family’s religious and political conservatism.      

     Perhaps to save her children from these tensions, his mother (Sahalia Baouche) is planning to move back to Algiers under the protection and support of her former lover who is also the head of the Algiers opera and the father of her other son, Hassan (Aïssa Djabri). Farid would like Jean to join him, but obviously Jean’s roots lie in Paris and he is frankly tired of being a “secret” lover for whom there is little hope, particularly when they return to Algiers, desiring instead to be openly out and the two settling in a domestic life together. As Farid’s sister tells Jean much later in the film, Farid would never have been able to commit to the life he desires the two of them to live.

     On top of all of this, the basically good kid has been hanging out with a gang that steals motorcycles, and is caught in the act, while the others escape. It is his first criminal offense, and finding himself suddenly alone as a young immigrant facing police interviewers and a possible sentencing, he is completely terrorized. How will his family react? Can he now even be free to travel with them to Algiers?

      More immediately, even though he is freed, he has no way home, no money except for a few coins for the phone, and no mode of transportation available. He calls his family without explaining the situation, but they are slow to respond; he calls Jean who immediately shows up, but seems removed and rather blasé about the situation. When Farid again begs him to join him in Algiers, Jean’s response is simply that he has a friend living there who is writing about Oran. Whether it is sudden jealousy or simply the glibness of that statement which reveals the easy associations and possibilities in Jean’s life as opposed to his own that sets him off is unknowable, as Farid suddenly breaks a glass from which he has been drinking, puts its splintered edge to his face, and runs off, with Jean racing after him to prevent further damage.

      Jean attempts to convince Farid to return home with him, but still hurt by an earlier remark that Jean made, that he believes Farid uses him simply as an easy “lay,” Farid refuses, suggesting that it is Jean not he who is incapable of love. Jean finally walks off without him.

      Farid again makes a desperate call to his family. This time Hassan promises to pick him up by 11 in front the courthouse, only to discover the others finally returning back home without him, delayed by problems with the car, a train-crossing delay, and other events, having been unable to locate him. Frantically they now all gather back in the cousin’s car to pick up Farid; but this time the car won’t even start.

      In the meantime, the police find a dead body, that of Farid, the boy having apparently killed himself by leaping in front of a train.

       The rest of film consists of the family in mourning, with Jean in attendance, attempting to make sense of the boy’s act. No one can fully say what’s on his or her mind. Nahed, the sister, knows fully of Jean and her brother’s relationship, but others suspect it. Hassan’s cousin describes Jean as a faggot and demands he leave, having no place in their mourning. How he has come to know about Jean’s relationship with Farid that has never explained. But in that act, he betrays his own guilt for being unable to get them to the courthouse and his blame of other family members as well, begining a terrible row which ends with the entire family making their way to the police station for answers which they never receive. Stopped even before they can enter the station, they end up violently breaking out the windows of any nearby vehicle and trashing the streets, resulting eventually with the police racing to the family’s apartment. By that time Nahed and Jean have left the violent familial rift, so we do not see the results; but presumably they are all arrested and charged.

      We cannot know how or why Farid was killed. Certainly, as Jean knows and might have told them—but crucially chooses not to speak—Farid’s state of mind was such that he might indeed have wanted to die. But it is just as likely that his fellow gang members might have been afraid of his betrayal and pushed him in front of the train. Some critics, such as David Lagachu have suggested the possibility even of a “honor” killing, certainly something the cousin might have been capable of and others in the community might have wanted or to whom some family member might have assigned the task. And finally, each of the mourners, the family members inevitably feel guilt about Farid’s death, for their failure to bring him home to safety, Nahed, for not taking her brother’s private confession more seriously, and Jean, for his lack of comprehension of the vast range of pushes and pulls in his lover’s life as well as his own lack of action with his friend most needed him.

      Whether the family members are even able to make their pilgrimage back to Algiers is unknown; but strangely Jean ends the film by making his way to what Farid has described as the “white” or “blank” city, a place presumably that tells you nothing about its or even your own existence—or perhaps a place in which one can start all over again.

 

Los Angeles, April l7, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Reivew (April 2023).