Felix at the Flicks

Days of Glory (Indigines)
Dir: Rachid Bouchareb
Starring: Jamel Debbouze, Sami Naceri, Sami Boujila
128 mins (French/Arabic)
****
The day this film was released, French president Jacques Chirac said announced a new pension plan for Second World War veterans from France's former colonies. This, of course, tells you just as much about the injustice and discrimination suffered by these forgotten war heroes as it does about the power of this excellent, and important, film.
The Oscar-nominated Days of Glory follows the lives of a troop of North African soldiers who enlisted during WWII to liberate from Nazi Oppression France, a motherland they had never seen. And yet it is the oppression of their white French superiors which casts a shadow over their seemingly incongruous patriotic actions.
Singing La Marseillaise and fighting for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, these outsiders are thrown into the front line and blown to bits in the last enclaves of Nazi resistance in Italy and France – all while being denied equal rations, letters from loved-ones, leave or a strong pair of boots.
When the first villages of Alsace are finally liberated by France in January 1945, it is not by French soldiers, but by these shivering North Africans. There faces, however, will not feature in the celebratory film reels and, sixty years later, the survivors will live in tiny bedsits in run-down suburbs without the state pension offered to those French soldiers of whiter hue.
Compelling performances from the main quartet of actors, and in particular comedian Jamel Debbouze, who is finally winning plaudits for his serious roles, makes Days of Glory a poignant and watchable story.
Director Rachid Bouchareb triumphantly avoids Hollywoodisation, and as a result many of the key moments, such as deaths scenes, are not overly sentimentalised. The film is not perfect – too many issues are tackled, dialogue is often too sparse, there is a surfeit of long, silent scenes, while the flash-forward finish is a trifle hackneyed – but it is wholly admirable in delivery and intent.
Days of Glory may not make you cry like other war films, but it will teach you a lesson and for that it is not to be missed. Released nationwide on 30 March.