THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – MUST SEE
A promise resonates in The Stormsthe first feature film by Franco-Algerian Dania Reymond-Boughenou, born in Algiers in 1982, trained at Fresnoy – National Studio of Contemporary Arts, in Tourcoing (North). A film perhaps shaky, but undoubtedly inhabited, above all participating in a certain current tendency of stories from the Maghreb to overflow the unspeakable (current traumas or horrors of the past) on the side of metaphor. So The Storms does he allow himself a foray into the fantastic to awaken the ghosts of the Algerian dark decade.
However, the word “Algeria” will never be pronounced, nor even the name of a city that we could nevertheless associate with the capital, and it is from this imprecision that the film starts, avoiding any referent (it has elsewhere was filmed in Morocco with an Algerian cast). Nacer (Khaled Benaissa), journalist in a national daily, investigates a strange phenomenon, namely storms of yellow dust which strike the countryside in the south of the country. When he returns to town, colleagues and parents sense a kind of suspicious silence in him.
This is because the first investigation hid another: the secret hunt for a repentant soldier, a former insurgent in the civil war, responsible for the death of his wife, a student killed by a bullet to the head. But as the storm reaches the city, Fajar (Camélia Jordana) reappears, settling in at home, as if returning from a long journey. She is not the only one: several cases have emerged of missing people returning to life.
The Storms is based on a simple and beautiful idea: the surges in climate change correspond to the gradual return of a collective repression, a historical memory impossible to overcome. The columns of dust not only raise the ashes of the past, they sand up a sluggish present that seems incapable of moving forward. If the whole presents some fragility, it is above all in the area of writing, through recourse to the form of journalistic investigation, which serves as a too obvious pretext for something else, and clumsily distills its share of clues and delayed revelations, without making much of a mystery about anything.
An unregulated atmosphere
Much more interesting is the film’s temptation to open up areas of contemplation and melancholy, to apply a twilight filter to everyday things. Thus the film opens with enigmatic images of a sea with red reflections, both deep and disturbing. The images of the city itself are taken between dogs and wolves, in indistinguishable chiaroscuros, in pouring rain or through meanders leading, for example, to a wild nightclub.
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