OVERSEAS
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
OVERSEAS is a film by Brigitte Rouan, from a script by Rouan, Philippe Le Guay, Christian Rullier, Cedric Kahn. It stars Rouan, Nicole Garcia, Marianne Basier, Philippe Galand, Yann Didet, Bruno Todeschini. Cinematography by Dominique Chapuis. No rating, but includes nudity. In French with English subtitles.
OVERSEAS is the story of three sisters living in French Algeria in the period from after World War II until the return of de Gaulle to power (and the imminent withdrawal of the French from Algeria). The story is told three times with each sister as the narrative focus each time. Each sister's reactions to the events around them is recorded: one trapped by her provincialism and Catholicism has her sensuous instincts blocked at every turn, and almost oblivious to the changes happening around her; one is practical, but is pressured into marrying a dreamer when she really wanted a strong man and winds up with one she must protect from financial ruin and assassination; the third and youngest is a volunteer nurse who crosses the line between the "colons" and the Algerian nationalists.
Rouan as writer and director, ably assisted by cinematographer Chapuis, controls and manipulates the three point-of-view stories deftly and with great clarity, to say nothing of wit. Each time we go through a scene like the initial airplane landing we learn new details, see new textures, understand more deeply what is really going on under the surfaces and off in the shadows on the edges. Rouan and Chapuis mix naturalism with bold touches of near-Greenaway stylizations.
Her achievement will make one think of Kurosawa's RASHOMON and the novels of Virginia Woolf, but she keeps to her own vision and purpose in exposing the injustices and beauty of Algeria's colonial past. She creates an indictment of and an homage to the *colons* and the Algerians.
I highly recommend this highly crafted, witty, ironic, and insightful film at full price. I hope you get a chance to see it.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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