The willingly forgotten involvement of indigenous soldiers from the Maghreb in the continental WWII battles of the French army is brought to attention again in director Rachid Bouchareb’s politically corrective Indigènes (Days of Glory). Staged as a series of vignettes rather than a character study or historical epic, the film is painfully aware of its important political duty to remind France of its unjust treatment of its ‘other’ soldiers, much to the detriment of character and story development. With a cast headed by comedian-turned-serious-actor Jamel Debouzze (Amélie, Angel-A), the film is sure to attract audience attention in Europe, while the serious subject matter will demand respect and reflection. As ‘just’ a genre film however, Indigènes is strangely uninvolving and distant until its last battle in an Alsatian hamlet finally creates the suspense, heartbreak and gut-punch one might expect from a war film, whether politically corrective or not.

 

Writer-director Bouchareb has chosen a lofty subject matter for his film and a fine cast of French-African actors, including Samy Naceri (from the Taxi franchise) as the sensible Yassir, Roschdy Zem (Le petit lieutenant/The Young Lieutenant) as the romantic Messaoud who falls in love with a French girl, Sami Bouajila (Embrassez qui vous voudrez) as the ambitious Corporal Abdelkader and the aforementioned Debouzze as the somewhat clueless but nevertheless endearing subordinate Saïd. Their story is told in small scenes: the recruitment in their home countries (which were then colonies of France), their perfunctory training, their first battle experience and the long waits around campfires and in snow-covered forests in between one attack or ambush and the next.

 

There is not a whole lot of fighting in Indigènes, which leaves the characters more than enough time to reflect on the second-class soldiers treatment that France – the country that is not truly theirs but for which the are fighting and putting their lives on the line – is giving them. In a scene aboard a ship on the Meditteranean, the titular indigènes (literally “the indigenous”) are not allowed to have the tomatoes that the mainland French soldiers are getting for dinner. Abdelkader is outraged and decides that everyone or no-one should have them, setting the scene for all things is to come. The problem of the screenplay, which was written by the director together with Olivier Lorelle, is that in making sure that the film’s main point is made clear, the characters and especially Abdelkader, are drawn as walking indignations rather than convincing people or even recognizable clichés.

 

Since it is hard to become emotionally involved with characters whose personalities look like sketches for political pamphlets, the film’s structure feels too loose to create any forward momentum. Scenes are built around moments of premeditated humiliation from outside, not around the accumulative experiences of who these people really are and what they believe or come to believe in. It is odd that the only time where something as precious and vulnerable as the lives and dignity of the characters seems to be at stake is during the final battle in an abandoned Alsatian hamlet, which is also the only sequence in which computer-generated special effects are clearly used. It is telling when a film's only truly emotional sequence is the one brought about by spectacular CGI explosions and digitally enhanced gunfire.

A special effect of an entirely different order was French president’s Chirac reaction to the film, which eventually led to the now-foreign soldiers’ pensions finally being raised to the level of their French counterparts. This is of course extremely good news, and might induce Bouchareb to cut the sickeningly PC coda set in the present for the upcoming DVD release, as those closing scenes effectively kill any goodwill that the film had to once again underline the injustice of the French government towards its colonial soldiers. It would have been better if Bouchareb and his actors had focused more on the characters and the story, and such a scene might have been wholly unnecessary to accomplish not only the same goals but also make a good film in the process.