Do not make mistakes, Omar the Strawberry It's a friendship story much more than a gangster film. This “bromance” in a scenario of excesses – violence, alcohol and drugs – connects Omar (Reda Kateb), a Frenchman of Algerian origin, to Roger (Benoît Magimel). On the run, these two figures of worn-out bandits, with incomparable comic potential, are exiled to Algiers to escape their prison sentence... And perhaps their conditioning.
Under the Algiers sun, with a tank top and vintage printed shirt on the back, combined with running flip-flops, Omar longs for his Parisian adventures, wanders around his villa without furniture and in his pool without water. He reaches the bottom without actually managing to drown. And he lives his exile, here in reverse, until his meeting with Meriem, an independent and hard-working young woman, team leader in a factory. cookies, which he clumsily tries to win over under the protective gaze of his lifelong accomplice.
After the (four hundred) blows, the sensitivity that humanizes our two lonely and broken souls remains. “I wanted to tell the behind-the-scenes story of the gangster figure. I liked the idea of taking figures of psychopaths and street children who really like ultra-violence and being able to awaken tenderness in them, says Elias Belkeddar, 35, who delivers his first fiction feature film here. They don't necessarily feel joy or pride in being assassins, they simply like software and a form of social determinism. This software is gradually deconstructed because a sensitive encounter occurs, which leaves room for vulnerability. »
Funny, tender, pop… So many qualifiers that collide with the world of criminals, which is a narrative pretext to better tell another love story, the one that Elias Belkeddar has with the country.
Filming Algeria differently
Son of Argentine parents who arrived in France in the 1960s, the filmmaker Algiers as we see it reported. He moves his camera following the wanderings of the two protagonists and thus captures the energy and topography of the capital. We go from a postcard scene to a dive into the belly of the city, reported on screen, as Climat de France, a monumental city, built in the 1950s, on whose roofs were installed slums.
“I filmed Algiers as I was able to live it and experience it, as a child, in a very classic way for a son of immigrants who spends his holidays there surrounded by family and friends,” he rewinds. I have always considered Algeria as the country of a story. In Spanish theater, we talk about Poland as an imaginary world. Mine is Algeria”, adds the man who co-produced the film (5 million euros) with Les Deux Horloges, a structure that Argelina created by her comrade Yacine Medkour.
A sign of renewal in the local industry, which has seen the emergence of series, web series and clips in the last ten years driven by a new generation of creatives. A movement that we feel in the film, which offers sequences filmed in the style of music videos – undoubtedly the funniest and most entertaining – where the two acolytes dance, launch can and cocktail in hand, to the sound of a soundtrack made up of raï, traditional music and urban.
“Africa is often filmed as a social setting. I wanted to show a fun representation of identity like Korean cinema, Tarentino's or Spike Lee's. And prove that we can film in ghettos not to talk about poverty and social issues, but to create entertainment. Sometimes it is a more political act than saying that Fátima has problems with her veil”, says the director, who also films street children, giving them a true heroic dimension.
Romantic characters, Tarantino references, local soundtrack, costumes and beldi (countryside) style… Aesthetically nothing is left to chance. “What interests me is being able to create pride, style and attitude even in poverty. In France, black people and Arabs never managed to do that”, laments the man who could very well be at the origin of a new genre, “beldixploitation”.
© Iconoclast – Chi-Fou-Mi Produções – StudioCanal – França 2 Cinema
Omar the Strawberry by Elias Belkeddar, with Reda Kateb, Benoît Magimel and Meriem Amiar, in cinemas in 24 it could.
