Brothers in arms fight for a cause

Days of Glory
Cast: Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri
Director: Rachid Bouchareb
****

Days of Glory, the English title of Rachid Bouchareb's film — called Indigènes, or natives, in French — has a rousing, somewhat generic war-movie ring. And Bouchareb, a French director of Algerian descent who has made four previous features, sticks close to the conventions of the genre as he follows a small group of World War II infantrymen from North Africa through Italy and across France into Alsace. His combat sequences are filmed with exquisite precision and edited with admirable economy, and the quieter moments that allow the characters of the men to emerge, find a perfect balance between dramatic impact and psychological authenticity.

In many ways, Days of Glory, fits comfortably into a proud and apparently inexhaustible cinematic tradition. It is a chronicle of courage and sacrifice, of danger and solidarity, of heroism and futility, told with power, grace and feeling, and brought alive by first-rate acting. A damn good war movie.

What makes Days of Glory something more — something close to a great movie — is that it finds a new and politically urgent story to tell in the well-trodden (and beautifully photographed) soil of wartime Europe. That English title also evokes the opening lines of La Marseillaise, which announce that the day of martial glory has arrived for "the children of the fatherland".

The soldiers in Bouchareb's film, from Algeria and other French colonies in North Africa, are fighting for France, but the nature of their patrimony is painfully ambiguous. Their stories are hardly unique: Hundreds of thousands of "indigenous soldiers" fought against the Axis under the French flag, but their experiences have had at best a marginal place in popular histories of the war.

Bouchareb, working from a packed, efficient script by Olivier Lorelle, has an impeccable sense of narrative rhythm. For all of its characters and incidents, Days of Glory rarely feels crowded or hectic, and its occasional didacticism never prevents you from appreciating the excellence of the film-making. Bouchareb makes every shot count.

The movie ends, true to Greatest Generation form, with a survivor's visit, 60 years after the war, to a cemetery, where rounded, tapered Muslim headstones are, at least, as numerous as white crosses. The last scenes suggest a grim corollary: If you die in a country, it's your home.

But the contradictions persist. The children and grandchildren of these soldiers, and their comrades, are still not entirely at home in France, which shed its colonies grudgingly (and in the case of Algeria, brutally) in the decades after the defeat of fascism. The "indigenous" soldiers saw their military pensions frozen in 1959 as their countries moved towards independence. A law passed in 2002 promised them restitution, but no funds were authorised until this year, when Jacques Chirac, the president of the republic, attended a screening of Days of Glory, a powerful exploration of injustice and resilience that arrived six decades too late, and just in time.