TAHAR RAHIM AND MAHMOUD SHALABY IN FREE MEN

Muslims and resistance in German-occupied Paris

The young star of Audiard's amazing 2009 A Prophet/Un prophète is back in the 2011 Free Men/Les Hommes libres, a film about a young Algerian in Paris in 1942 inspired to join the resistance by his friendship with a Jewish man. In 2009 Tahar Rahim won Best Actor at the French Césars; A Prophet won the Grand Prix at Cannes. Free Men again gives the young Rahim the central role. This is two or three films. Again, it sets up Rahim as a young man being formed into something stronger. Come from Algeria to work in a factory, his Younes got TB and recovered but lost his job. As a black marketer getting by, he's caught in a raid and recruited at police headquarters where it's believed the muslims are issuing false documents.

But this is also indirectly a biopic about Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit (played by the venerable and monumental Michael Lonsdale of Beauvois' Of Gods and Men and many other great films), founder and rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, who aided the anti-Nazi resistance. It's the story of the resistance, of which Younes becomes more and more a part. The friendship that leads him to want to help protect Jewis is with Salime, a superb Algerian singer and musician, reputedly the best in Europe, who turns out to be Jewish. While Jews and Arab Muslims are seen as at each other's throats, it is interesting to learn that their twin outsider status made them allies in Paris under the Vichy government.

Des hommes libres is also a celebration of the marvelous Arab music of the period, and its musical interludes are the highlights of the film and symbolize music's power to transform and unify and transmit culture, even under the most repressive conditions of German occupation.

And Les hommes libres' undercurrent is the birthing of the Algerian independent movement, which all the Algerian political activists in Paris at this time are aware of and involved in, and which gains great impetus by the Liberation, which made the Algerians see allies in the Americans and their own liberation from French colonial oppression in the liberation of the French from Nazi occupation.

The essentiality of Free Men is that it represents an unrecognized story of a role played during the war by maghrebins, North African Arabs, in the attempt to save Jews from Nazi extermination. It's another story that needed to be told and it's an interesting one. After all, France has the biggest muslim population of any country in Europe. They matter. And the Algerians' relationship with the French is a complex one.

Tahar Rahim again has the role of a tabula rasa, a young man of little personality or character who is changed by strong events as he was changed by prison in A Prophet and by his association with the Corsican capo played by the great Niels Arestrup in Audiard's film. Little by little Younes, who spends more and more time at the mosque to satisfy his Vicny police handlers gives up trading on the black market. He does it for profit, and then begins to care.

The singing of the charismatic, popular and blue-eyed Salime Halali delights Younes. He also is attracted to Warba Shlimane alias Leila (Lubna Azabal of Incendies), who turns out to be a communist activist in hiding, and he saves a couple of Jewish children turned over to him where he lives. The Grand Mosque Rector is increasingly menaced by the Nazi officer Major von Ratibor (Christopher Buchholz), whom he wards off with deftness and aplomb.

Free Men is an interesting picture of historical events, but its meandering structure is in search of driving central action or more intense development on the part of Younes, a composite character created to pull together all the action of muslim resistance volunteers gathered around the other specific historical figures. It's going to be hard for Tahar Rahim to get another role as strong as the one he played in A Prophet -- unless he can work with Audiard again or someone of his caliber. Israeli-Arab actor Mahmoud Shalaby, who plays Salime, seems promising. Unfortunately the writing falls short. Two many paths in too many directions.

Too bad, because this is a worthy subject and Free Men has its own unique atmosphere of an unseen world inside occupied Paris. The film sings literally and figuratively during the passages of live musical performance. When an actor playing great Egyptian singer-songwriter Mohamed Abdel Wahab, thin and in dark glasses, appears performing with Salime at a cafe, it recreates a magic moment for fans of modern Arabic music.

Les Hommes libres opened in Paris September 28, 2011 to fairly good reviews (Allociné 3.0) that recognized an honest effort, but some spoke of "missed opportunity" and a plot and a too diffuse plot. It's a "modest recreation" -- perhaps too modest. But this is not a dead end for Rahim, who has been in Kevin Macdonald's The Eagle; will be in Lou Ye's Love and Bruises; and in another shot during the Turnisian revolution. He describes himself in an Inrocks interview: "I continue to grow. I'm finding a focus for my anxiety."

Free Men was observed at a press and industry screening for this review in preparation for the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, the joint festival of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and UniFrance, March 1-11, 2012. Public screenings:

Fri., March 2, 1pm – WRT; *Sat., March 3, 9:15pm – WRT; *Sun., March 4, 4pm - IFC
*In person: Ismael Ferroukhi and Tahar Rahim

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.