Although Mok affects hip, he’s as inept as Alilo. An aspiring rapper, he gets booed off the stage when he tries to perform a hip-hop version of La Fontaine’s animal fables. As Alilo learns, his cousin is a desperate phony who makes up stories about the hardships of his family in Paris to compete with Alilo’s genuine tales of woe from back in Algiers. In fact, compared with the housing blocks he’s escaped from, Mok’s new home is a multi-cultural paradise, with Arabs and Africans brushing shoulders with American novelists and Japanese painters and uniting against the occasional skinhead assault. In this roughhewn oasis of tolerance, Alilo meets an African woman and falls in love.
Allouache exercises his comic skills to the full in Salut cousin!: his touch is light, his eye exacting, his timing impeccable, and he doesn’t loses sight of the dread and darkness lying behind the blithest jest. Similarly, when his subject is bleakest, his humor pops up in the strangest places, black and perverse and revelatory, like the kitten cradled by the bloodthirsty, effete emir in
L’Autre Monde|The Other World
(2001; February 25 at 7 pm).
The inverse of Salut cousin!, L’autre monde follows the fate of Yasmine, a French woman of Algerian descent who’s returned to her native land to hunt down her beloved Rachid. (Cousin? Brother? Fiancé? She has a different story for everyone who asks.) He left France for Algeria months before, was drafted by the army, and disappeared. Veiled in a hidjab but not knowing a word of Arabic, Yasmine journeys through the most dangerous regions of the war-ravaged country. From a gruff but kindly Algerian officer she learns that Rachid was one of two soldiers missing after a terrorist ambush. She insists on visiting the site, is captured herself, and escapes in the company of one of the terrorists, who’s become infatuated with her. As it tumbles toward its climax, L’autre monde seems more schematic than Allouache’s other films, tending toward Mok’s La Fontaine fables. But the details of terror, desperation, cruelty, and humanity transcend the story’s brutal moral.
What is it that Allouache tells us about the street? In Bab El-Oued City, a Frenchman takes his blind aunt on a tour of Algiers, describing to her the beauty that is no longer there. “What is that smell?” she says. In Salut cousin!, a merchant who hasn’t been to Algiers in 30 years evokes his home town with music. “I smell the mint . . . the coriander,” he says, imagining a walk through the city. Perhaps Allouache’s word from the street is that we can’t look away from the filth that has accumulated there — or forget that it is meant to be a place of beauty and peace.
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