I liked this film,had to buy the dvd since it was hardly on the big screen in the UK.
Can I ask people who saw this film,did they think it was a crime thriller pretending to be a political film or am I being unfair?
I expected the film to be a political thing about how the french far left and the algerians united to help the anti french forces in Algeria,but this was mostly a gangster story I think.
"Gangsta flick", are you kidding me? Yeah, one of the brothers makes a living with brothels and a night club, but that is at odds with the mission his older brothers are sacrificing their lives for. There are so many interesting points brought up in the film, as in the colonel who used to fight for the Resistance, now fighting to kill the Algerian resistance, or the fact that Algerian soldiers and black Africans are used to suppress an indigenous population in Indochina/Vietnam while their families are being suppressed at home...
Please read up on the Algerian conflict and the Vichy French regime, who sided with Hitler during WWII. The Allies fought them in Indochina, where we funded and supported the Viet Minh (oh the irony), and in North Africa, where they quickly surrendered when allied forces landed. So after the war, instead of giving the land and sovereignty to the people who fought the Vichy, it was awarded back to the Vichy, now just the French. So the French, who had been oppressed and subjugated by the Nazis, their pride at an all time low, decide they are still an international power and go about suppressing and killing thousands. Why in Algeria? Oil of course. Instead of peacefully exiting and continuing diplomatic ties, they chose a different route, a way that has lead to the tortured and miserable existence of Algeria. History has many lessons, humanities greatest failure is that they never seem to learn from them. Never.
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The blu-ray cover said this was a gangster movie but it was purely a political/terrorist film I would argue.
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