Alexandre Arcady's semi-biopic is overly sentimental, but well informed
European Jewish history is well-documented in cinema. Comparatively, there is a dearth of stories about North African Jewish communities. After existing for thousands of years, most were forced to leave their ancestral homes during the violence and upheavals of the 20th century. There were once over 100,000 Jews in Algeria. Now just a handful are left.
Attempting to redress this imbalance is Le Petit Blond de la Casbah, confusingly and generically translated as Once Upon a Time in Algeria for an English audience. It is the semi-autobiographical memoir of French director Alexandre Arcady. Born in Algeria to a Hungarian father, Sania, and a Jewish Algerian mother, Dinah, he is the self-styled "little blonde boy of the Casbah". Growing up in the beautiful coastal city of Algiers, his memory of his youth is steeped in nostalgia. The film is not a factual historic account, rather a memory of something irretrievably lost. His Casbah, Algeria's UNESCO-protected old town, is a place where people of all religions, ethnicities and nationalities once coexisted happily together. His family’s apartment block represents this idealised multicultural society in miniature. A Muslim Algerian family live upstairs, a Spaniard downstairs, with his Jewish family sandwiched inbetween.
This romanticised vision is forgivable as it is, after all, a child’s perspective. The film itself acknowledges this, framing the story through two interweaving timelines. The first is set during the protagonist’s youth; the second decades later when he returns to Algiers as a man. He is now an internationally renowned film director and has returned to the country to screen his latest movie. This all becomes quite meta, as the film he is premiering is called Le Petit Blond de la Casbah. It leads to a self-congratulatory finale in which Arcady imagines himself receiving an adoring ovation, declaring on stage that his love for Algeria is reciprocated. It’s an awkward and mawkish moment.
That's not to say that the more complex and challenging elements of history are ignored. On the contrary, as the Algerian War of Independence intensifies, the film is unflinching in its portrayal of the brutality and violence that ensued. Civilians are gunned down in the street and blown up at cafes; French paratroopers hurl racial slurs as they fruitlessly pursue their quarry through the labyrinthine alleyways of the Casbah; the protagonist’s father fills syringes full of acid at the dinner table to protect them all from a potential pogrom. The family’s final escape aboard a ship is heartbreakingly sad. Dinah breaks down on the quayside at the thought of leaving her deceased mother’s body alone in the cemetery.
Whilst the narrative of Once Upon a Time in Algeria is somewhat meandering, it makes up for it with a series of wonderfully observed vignettes of Jewish life in a North African country. It is a profoundly sweet and heartfelt film, made with a great deal of love and affection for a lost community and a lost world.
By Barney Pell Scholes
Once Upon a Time in Algeria is out now.