French writer-director Oelhoffen parlays a 1957 short story by Albert Camus into a quietly riveting quasi-Western, set in the sere rocky uplands of Algeria in the 1954, at the start of the bloody war against the French colonisers.
Mortensen, in a wonderfully contained performance in which he displays his proficiency in both Arabic and French, plays Daru, an ex-soldier whose quiet life as a backblocks schoolteacher is interrupted by the arrival of a mounted gendarme with an Arab prisoner (Kateb).
The gendarme orders Daru to take the Arab (Camus pointedly never named him but Oelhoffen calls him Mohamed) to the nearest garrison town.
Camus' finely wrought 5000- word story packs a lot in, though the pair never make the trip. Rather, the action is all internal: Daru's reluctance to take sides; the Arab's ambivalence about freedom; and a ending dripping with sour dramatic irony; all add up to an intense rumination on the nature of colonialism and whether it is possible ever to slip the bonds of race and class.
