THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
What country do we belong to? This is the thorny question that every immigrant must face, one day or another, when they mentally commute between their country of origin and their new home. On this shifting ground, the Franco-Algerian filmmaker Mohamed Hamidi recommends a return to the bled of a few days, in the vein of his first film, born somewhere (2013), which followed the journey of a student in complete rupture with his Algerian origins. The director is interested this time in a French writer born in Algeria who has not walked the land of his ancestors for forty years.
The novelist’s CV does not quibble about success and its advantages: Nobel Prize for Literature, Samir Amin (Kad Merad), applauded for his stories from childhood, lives in the Paris region, in a modern house overlooking a lake, so perfect that it could appear in the best pages ofAD Magazine. But none of this glazing makes his pen feverish: the man of letters spins bad cotton. And he is depressed enough to leave his luxury and agree to return for a few days to his native village, Sidi Mimoun, who wishes to name him honorary citizen.
As soon as he arrives, the journey is like a breath of fresh air as well as a survival course and a new source of inspiration. First, the millennial mountains. Then a herd of sheep quietly blocking the road. Finally, the driver Miloud (Fatsah Bouyahmed, trained in commedia dell’arte, noticed in The cow, by Mohamed Hamidi, in 2016), bledard happy as all to receive a great of this world, of which he however did not read a line.
Playnets in a row
We find more broadly the sympathetic touch of the filmmaker (with an atypical background – associate professor of economics, artistic collaborator of Jamel Debbouze and founder of the Bondy Blog) in his picaresque description of Sidi Mimoum: the inhabitants bend over backwards to welcome the prodigy son but nothing works, neither electricity nor telephone. The tributes are approximate and the buffets prepared in a hurry.
We feel how this plot is apt to highlight the particular mechanisms at work in a small town confronted with the celebrity of one of its own: alongside the fans, there are those who accuse the novelist of having looted their stories, to deny one’s religion and to give lessons to young people… Can one write about a country one has left? Do we still have a say? Do we have to be accountable?
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