An aesthetic, political journey around Algeria's edge.

Byline: Jim Quilty

Summary: The opening sequence of "Ghabbla" ("Inland"), the second feature by Algerian filmmaker Tariq Teguia, could be a precis of the film as a whole. The dominant impression is that of color, a grainy golden-brown. Movement adds to the scene's haze of ill-definition. By the time the film's opening credits appear.

Review

ROTTERDAM: The opening sequence of "Ghabbla" ("Inland"), the second feature by Algerian filmmaker Tariq Teguia, could be a precis of the film as a whole. The dominant impression is that of color, a grainy golden-brown. Movement adds to the scene's haze of ill-definition. By the time the film's opening credits appear, the electricity towers flying past on the bottom half of the screen afford a temporal reality to the hue and motion.

The film that uncoils after this sequence devotes as much creative energy to capturing its sense of place as it does narrative specifics. So spare is the story - and so strong is the landscape fixation of Nacer Medjkane and Hacene Ait Kaci's cinematography - that an onlooker might mistake "Inland" for a non-narrative 140-minute-long study in mood.

Allusive as its plotting is, "Inland" is a narrative drama. Its characters are grounded in a story of post-civil-war reconstruction - human and material, economic and social - and migration. It happens to be located in contemporary Algeria, but it's a story that many societies have had to pass through.

At the center of the story is 40-something Malik (Abdelkader Affak), whom you first encounter sitting alone in a rural hovel, silently smoking. What he's doing in this otherwise derelict-looking village is unsaid.

Malik receives a visitor, bearing a telegram from the nearby city of Oran. The messenger tells him that friends of theirs were arrested during recent political demonstrations.

"What did they burn?" Malik asks.

"The archive," he replies, though the post office and the Internet cafe went unscathed. "If they burnt the Internet cafe," the visitor continues, "we'd have nothing."

Malik appears in Oran for a meeting with a pair of suits - the young boss, Aziz, and the older Lakhdar (Ahmad Benaissa), who is an old acquaintance of Malik's. Aziz and Lakhdar represent a private company, contracted to complete the state's land survey of the Ouarsenis region, a tract of desert and oasis south of Oran that hasn't yet been placed on the national electrical grid.

The region's villagers are only now returning to their homes, having abandoned them after attacks by Islamist militiamen. These militants killed the last two surveyors dispatched to the region.

Malik takes the job with a shrug. While in Oran he sees his wife Zehra (Djalila Kadi-Hanifi), a surprisingly bourgeois-looking woman. She's cordial, and happy Malik has taken a job with Lakhdar, but ultimately concerned that he sign their divorce papers.

The camera does not introduce Malik immediately. The near-silent sequence of color-in-movement that opens the film ends abruptly with a loud conversation among friends, the sort you'd find among activist intellectuals in a cafe - though these scenes are shot so close to the speakers' faces that location is anonymous. The debate apparently began long before the camera finds it, and it continues throughout the course of the film, returning to the screen like a dissonant chorus in a Greek tragedy.

The first stage of cafe discussion settles momentarily on whether intellectuals should "think for society" or whether "intellectuality permeates all society." Later in the film, you find them repeating the somehow familiar refrain, "This society wants to live. It isn't a kamikaze society ... Long live life! Down with death!"

From these threads - Malik's barren life on the rural fringes of Algeria, his knowledge of the Oran demonstrators, his well-groomed (soon-to-be-ex) wife, who could fit quite comfortably within the cafe argument - it seems Malik is a refugee from Algeria's left-leaning bourgeoisie, somehow a casualty of the struggle between the FLN old guard and Islamist militants for control of the state. By taking the surveying job, he joins the drive to brush aside the embers of civil war with the broom of neoliberal development.

The rural narrative Malik enters is just as allusively told as the urban one he has left behind. Slender threads of incident appear as motifs rather than episodes integral to the plot.

Malik's first task upon arriving in Ouarsenis is to clean the gutted trailer where his predecessors were slain. He, and the camera, devote careful attention to the residues of a red-brown splash against the wall above his bed - a fountain of blood dried in the desert heat? Some less-lethal bodily discharge?

Malik's minimalist conversations with his curious but friendly village neighbors rotate around inquiries about how long they've been carrying arms and the cause of the explosions that wake him up during the night.

Some nosy and officious thugs from state security visit Malik and demand that he deliver his work authorization to their office in town. His efforts to do so are blocked, however, by a wedge of angry protesters.

He tries to step out of his car, telling the demonstrators they must state their demands calmly and coherently. In return, he's threatened.

"People have died," a man screams. "One war ends. Another war begins. No one knows."

At various points in the film, the camera encounters shadowy, unspeaking people walking cross-country at night. These turn out to be migrants, moving illegally through Algeria from sub-Saharan Africa to Morocco, thence Europe. One of them is hospitalized and interrogated by the town's mukhabarat, who tell him some of his party were killed.

One of the group who escapes police detection is "the girl" (Ines Rose Djakou). Malik finds her while exploring an abandoned warehouse near his trailer. He eventually offers to help her get to the Moroccan border. She announces that she wants to return home - a sentiment that finds its way into a lot of European-funded North African cinema these days.

By this point Malik seems to have lost interest in his constantly delayed task. In any case, he volunteers to take her back to the country's southern border, a journey that sees them abandon his broken-down truck, hitching a ride in the back of a shepherd's truck, a train, then a borrowed quad-runner - which provides an excuse for an amusing moment of American-style biker-music accompaniment.

Aziz has started to become anxious about how long Malik is taking to finish the survey, so Lakhdar travels to Ouarsenis, only to find he's already gone. The developer continues to look for his friend until the end of the movie - a role that in a film like, say, "Thelma and Louise" would be performed by the police.

"Inland" has earned critical accolades, winning the FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) Prize at the 2008 Venice Film Festival, but it makes definite demands of its audience.

Its narrative - co-written by Teguia and his brother Yacine - demands the audience play an active role in constructing the narrative of Malik's life from the minimal information that seeps to the surface of the film. In this it's not unlike some short fiction, in which much plot detail is implied rather than explicitly told.

This deliberate road trip around the edges of contemporary Algeria will be especially challenging for those who like movies in which dramatic things happen to characters who behave according to transparent motives.

Arguably, this sort of transparent drama has more to do mainstream cinema convention than real life, where people's actions during dramatic events can be far from transparent - not least in societies that have suffered the trauma of a long, bloody and largely opaque civil war, as the people of rural Algeria have done.

There are small rewards in an approach in which a scorpion sting is no more traumatic, and not necessarily more deadly, than lovemaking, in which the portrait of the president on the wall behind a cop's desk can be amusingly beheaded by way you frame a scene.

"Inland" deploys narrative and image to foreground an elemental tale of individuals upon landscape. Its major accomplishment lies in doing this without ignoring the tragic, sometimes-vague complexities of Algerians' lived experience, or reducing them to aesthetics.

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