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.
![A scene from the film Far From Men.](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/4YE6EBJQ6OF2WELSVRAV6A7LMA.jpg?auth=75ea0fc4ed51efd21e99998ccf5c2ade01f15d0ee52f61149e2f2ac18d122b3f&width=16&height=11&quality=70&smart=true)
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.