Photo via Seventh Art Releasing
The Blonde Boy from the Casbah
The Blonde Boy from the Casbah
Algiers was Paris on the Mediterranean, a bustling café city under shady palm trees. Looming overhead the modern district was the medieval Casbah whose white cubed structures foreshadowed modernism. The Casbah was largely inhabited by indigenous Algerians but was home to others as well. In The Blond Boy from the Casbah, the boy protagonist, Antoine, fair-faced and Jewish, grew up in that district whose impressions indelibly shaped his imagination.
The Blond Boy from the Casbah may be French director Alexandre Arcady’s answer to Cinema Paradiso. Like Salvatore in Paradiso, Antoine grew up to be an esteemed filmmaker who revisits his hometown after an absence of many years. However, Salvatore and his family weren’t forced to flee. Antoine grew up in French Algeria just as a violent insurgency wrestled the country into independence. It’s a story inspired by Aracady’s life. He was 15 in the early ‘60s when his family, along with one million other people, packed and left Algeria in haste. The refugees included French and Italian settlers along with Jews and indigenous Algerians who worked for the French regime.
Antoine lived with his parents and four siblings in a comfortable if crowded apartment in the Casbah, a menorah on the mantle along with his father’s framed medals from service in the Foreign Legion. He discovered an attraction to girls and to movies with his neighbor, Josette, who brought him to the Sunday cinema club at the Algiers Olympia. In the first sign of trouble, troops at the theater’s entrance search filmgoers for bombs. On the Sunday when the feature was Rene Clement’s World War II drama, Forbidden Games, and as Stuka dive bombers shrieked across the screen, a car bomb exploded across the street from the cinema. Most moviegoers ran out to look, but Antoine couldn’t peel his eyes from the movie. “I prefer films to life,” he insisted.
However, life has a way of penetrating the illusions of any form of virtual reality, including cinema. The rebellion against French rule by FLN terrorists was cruel and random, as was the French response. Bombs blew up under soccer field stands, cafes were sprayed by submachine guns and troops were quick to kill. “There’s too much injustice in this country,” says Antoine’s father, realizing that it’s time to leave.
The Blond Boy of Casbah is elegiac and bittersweet as the adult Antoine surveys the now rundown Algiers Olympia and recalls Josette’s gift of a novel by Albert Camus, a French Algerian whose writings recall a homeland that no longer exists. The film is ultimately uplifting in its depiction of Antoine’s apartment building where neighbors gathered on the mezzanine, fanning themselves against the heat and minding each other’s children. Spaniards, French, Arabs and Jews lived there, and everyone gathered to watch the circumcision of Antoine’s baby brother. It’s a memory of times and places in North Africa and the Middle East when multiculturalism flourished—an epoch before fervid nationalists and religious extremists began to impose monocultures on the lands they ruled.
The Blond Boy from the Casbah screens 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 28 as part of the 27th annual Milwaukee Jewish Film Festival. The festival runs October 27-31 at the Marcus North Shore Cinema. For more information, visit mkejewishfilm.eventive.org/welcome.
