Doha Tribeca Film Festival: Outside The Law (Hors La Loi)

The second Doha Tribeca Film Festival kicked off with an unbelievably busy outdoor screening of Rachid Bouchareb's Cannes entry Outside The Law, with some 2,000 locals, mostly westerners from what I could see, crammed into an outdoor stadium that looked like the set from David Bowie's late-80s Glass Spider Tour. Impressive it was, comfortable it wasn't, although thankfully the heat soon subsided into a more manageable humidity. Even more impressive than the setting, however, was the audience's generosity; Bouchareb's film, though a noble effort to create something fresh and accessible from the still touchy subject of the French-Algerian war, is not exactly a crowd-pleaser.

It's possible that few in the audience were aware of the film's incendiary qualities (in Cannes, screenings were subject to extra security), because it plays out as a rather stiff, would-be-epic melodrama – a friend of Bouchareb's, with whom I shared a cab and who explained some of the film's more general controversies to me, raised comparisons to Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America, of which I'd been reminded too. If this was the director's intention, he captures some of that film's sweep, mostly in an early scene depicting a massacre in the Algerian town of Sétif in May 1945. But where Leone's film was rich and ambiguous, Bouchareb's is much more schematic and rote, unnecessarily sentimental even.

It starts with an Algerian family being turfed off their ancestral farmland by the French in the mid-1920s. It then skips forward to the 40s, where the farmer's three boys are now men and each at a decisive crossroad in his life: Saïd (Jamel Debbouze) moves to Paris, where he lives in poverty and makes money first as a pimp then a club manager and a boxing promoter. Messaoud (Roschdy Zem) joins the French army, becoming involved in the carnage of Indochine (another reason the French authorities hate this movie). And Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila), having been imprisoned for his political beliefs, becomes an active radical and a leader of the Algerian independence movement.

The three brothers' disparate storylines are neatly interwoven at first, but when they converge in the second half the film disappointingly scales down, becoming more about blood ties and family than the wider issues of the political situation. A particularly interesting subplot – which suggests the French police created a fake terror gang to discredit the Algerians – brings a glimmer of thriller-movie urgency that promises to set things back on track, but this is soon abandoned. Instead, Bouchareb returns to the brothers for an underwhelming climax in which Saïd attempts to ignore Abdelkader's political proselytizing and enter an Algerian boxer into a French boxing match. Though Outside The Law touches on the Algerian underground's willingness to kill its own – Saïd will be murdered by Abdelkader's group if he goes ahead with the bout – it shows very little of this outlying terror network, or even Abdelkader's actual work as an undercover operative.

I know some stories are meant to be seen in microcosm, but quite a lot of this film is left tantalisingly sketchy and vague, which, if it were a subtler movie, would be fine. Now, it's not as crass as Miral, but the balance of information given and knowledge assumed is quite severe and is not going to be good news for Outside The Law's UK box office. I wanted to like it, but it left me, ironically enough in the heat of Doha, really rather cold.