Sarah 33, Death Race 23; 15 of 24 categories completed

Hey, fight for Algerian independence that tests the love and loyalties of three brothers: be less clichéd and plodding! Don’t have exchanges like

“Money means freedom.”
“I am not free until my country is free.”

…! Don’t have children, clearly 10 or 12 years old when the chyron reads 1925, appear 25 or 30 in 1957! Skip the stupid mustaches in favor of sympathetic characters who aren’t one-dimensional pinko Zeligs!

I wanted to like Outside The Law, I really did. I know next to nothing about the fight for Algerian statehood, except that surely it must contain thousands of fantastic, interesting stories — and this isn’t one of them. I think it’s shooting for fable status, so it’s trying to deal in archetypes instead of people, and it just doesn’t work; the movie is inert, trudging from one vignette of radicalization in response to imperial abuse to the next, forcing its characters to speak in the stilted generalities of a social-hygiene movie. “First our revolution, then you can do your boxing” — is that a joke? The script couldn’t find any subtler way to point up the contrast between the older brothers’ single-minded devotion to their cause and the youngest brother’s desire to make a life for himself? Or is the point that, while revolution is fascinating, revolutionaries are dull?

The acting is pretty good, under the circumstances. I found myself thinking — when I wasn’t fighting sleep (and losing) — that actors from outside the U.S. look like people, and U.S. actors look like…actors. This isn’t always the case, but American actors tend to have a uniformity of feature and prettiness, a blankness of canvas that won’t distract from the story, perhaps. Actors from elsewhere look unique, realer, like each of their faces comes with a few stories. Compare George Clooney and Javier Bardem. The Cloon is very likely handsomer to us now because we know that he’s smart and politically committed and he doesn’t take himself too seriously, but before he became Cary Grant II: Electric Pet-Pig-aloo, just looking at his face, his attractiveness did have an assembly-line, standardized way about it. Bardem looks like a statue from Easter Island. His features don’t work in the same proportional concert. The id seems closer.

The actors playing the older two brothers, Messaoud and Abdelkader (Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila, respectively), don’t have many choices with the material, but they have those lived-in faces. Zem has a few moments where he renders eloquently how much more dangerous a man can be when he knows he’s doing wrong and does it anyway, and Bouajila successfully hardens Abdelkader’s face into a dutiful mask of resolve. Chafia Boudraa as their mother is also wonderful, and has such an expressive, funny way of widening her eyes — I’d rather have seen a movie about her, but of course she’s confined to muttering about Messaoud’s pregnant wife or the bag of soil they brought from their land in Algeria.

I’ve almost finished the Best Foreign category, but this won’t win, and shouldn’t.

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