THE “WORLD” OPINION – A MUST SEE
A promise resonates The stormsthe first feature film by the French-Algerian Dania Reymond-Boughenou, born in Algiers in 1982, trained at Fresnoy – National Studio of Contemporary Arts, in Tourcoing (North). A film that may be shaky, but undoubtedly inhabited, above all participating in a certain current tendency of stories from the Maghreb to spill the unspeakable (current traumas or past horrors) on the side of metaphor. So The storms he allows himself a foray into the fantastic to awaken the ghosts of Algeria’s dark decade.
The word “Algeria” will never be pronounced, not even the name of a city that we could still associate with the capital, and it is precisely from this imprecision that the film starts, avoiding any referent (it was filmed elsewhere in Morocco). with an Algerian distribution). Nacer (Khaled Benaissa), a journalist for a national daily, investigates a strange phenomenon, namely the yellow dust storms that hit the countryside in the south of the country. When he returns to town, his classmates and parents feel a kind of suspicious silence in him.
That’s because the first investigation hid another: the secret hunt for a repentant soldier, a former insurgent in the civil war, responsible for the death of his wife, a student killed by a bullet to the head. But as the storm hits the city, Fajar (Camélia Jordana) reappears, settling in at home as if returning from a long journey. She is not the only one: there have been several cases of missing persons who have come back to life.
The storms it is based on a simple and beautiful idea: the increase of climate change corresponds to the gradual return of a collective repression, of a historical memory impossible to overcome. Columns of dust not only raise the ashes of the past, but polish a sluggish present that seems unable to move forward. If the ensemble shows some fragility, it is mostly in the area of the writing, using the form of investigative journalism, which serves as an all-too-obvious pretext for something else and clumsily distills its share of clues and belated revelations. , without making a big mystery about anything.
An unregulated atmosphere
Much more interesting is the film’s temptation to open up areas of contemplation and melancholy, to apply a crepuscular filter to everyday things. Thus the film opens with enigmatic images of a sea with red reflections, both deep and disturbing. The images of the city itself are taken between dogs and wolves, in indistinguishable chiaroscuro, in torrential rain or through meanders that lead, for example, to a wild nightclub.
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