Fantastic!

Expected more

Dreadfully Boring

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

I would add some contextual points which may not be well known to non French audiences but are essential to fully understand this film and where it is coming from. Firstly, it is not a "WW2 film", it is a film about the Armée d'Afrique in WW2: the film structure follows the campaign history of the Army across Europe.If France was able to have a seat with the Big 4 at Berlin and UN Security Council, it rests on the shoulders of the Armée d'Afrique and its role in the Italy Campaign, Dragoon Landings of Provence, Liberation of France, and drive into Germany, and its soldiers which we see in this film - they gave France its place with the victorious allies, and were conveniently forgotten by a France seeking to forget the débacle of its discredited political leaders of 1940. Such soldiers also fought in WW1 (some can be seen on the Memorial Arch war monument in Constantine as alluded to by Saïd/Debbouze's mother), and in the Indochina War. Ergo, they were French, spilled their blood for France, but were denied their political rights (and full pensions), which is to France's shame. By accepting their service, France acknowledged their equality implicitly but could never bring itself to acknowledge it explicitly - a typical characteristic I might add.Indeed to this day, there is not only a fissure between the French and the "indigènes" of the movie - the Arab soldiers, but between the "mainland French" and the "overseas French" - the "Pieds Noirs" - Martinez of the movie. Pieds Noirs are present day rootless French that feel they were sold down the river when France let Algeria go, and who are still rancorous, as mainland French look down on them and their accents (upon arriving in Marseille in 1962, the Pieds Noirs were told get back on their boats and get out of town). This film speaks to all these implied elements, as the French officers look down at Martinez, with his immigrant name, neither French, nor Arab (they would know he was half Arab due to his "etat civil" which is a type of long form birth certificate and part of his Army Record). These are the present day right wing of France - hankering after a lost Algeria, never really at home in a France of cold weather and strange food, vocal and militant.As for the film, the ethnic music may be considered heavy handed but it is meant to illustrate the duality of the Army - a hybrid of two cultures that was threatening to become something new that eventually, both sides backed away from - a "rendezvous manqué", as the French would say - one of several in this long Franco-Algerian story which is not yet over and continues in an odd symbiotic post independence relationship that transcends the behaviour of petulant idiosyncratic individuals.Finally, regarding the controversy about rapes in Italy of this army, this should also be placed in the overall context of the conduct of victorious armies in War, episodic cases of excess in all armies too numerous and tiresome to mention, and which pales in comparison to the systematic behaviour of the Einsatzgruppen in the Eastern Front, SS at Oradour-Sur-Glane, or Wehrmacht executing 41 African POWs at Clamecy, France in 1940 for example. It behooved Fascist Axis Italy to point the finger of blame elsewhere by discrediting a multiracial victorious French Armée d'Afrique with racial atrocity stories - such proponents may wish to consider the behaviour of the Regio Exercito in Africa Orientale Italiana to give such matters fuller consideration.All in all this film tells a story which needed telling, and tells it competently in the two limited hours it has, but it helps to understand the context behind the scenes. Having seen it, one leaves it having learned something important and sad - as Saïd and Martinez were unable to connect in life but were drawn together in death, Indigènes to me is a story above all of missed rendezvous which is very much with us today.

Rachid Bouchareb and Olivier Lorelle's movie uncovers a missing story from WWII in telling the story of the North African French soldiers who suffered discrimination while fighting for a country that not only colonized theirs but that they had been taught to regard as their true homeland.The movie follows four natives - Morrocan and Algerian soldiers - and a pied-noir, a French sergeant living in Algeria, and is mostly an indictment against France for the way it abused its own patriot soldiers. Each character exists mostly to highlight a particular type of discrimination: there's the intelligent, outspoken native who deserves to become a sergeant and yet is always ignored in favor of Frenchmen or pied-noirs. There's the young native who becomes the sergeant's aide-de-camp in a patronising relationship (oblivious to the sergeant, of course, who thinks he's a pretty fair man). There's the native in love with a French woman and all the problems that come from that. And so on...Since most characters exist to make points, they're never real characters. Perhaps with the exception of Sargeant Martinez, who hides his Arab roots and has a love-hate relationship with his men that makes him hard to define; and Corporal Abdelkader, a man who keeps deluding himself that one day France will recognise his efforts and valor.There's an aura of sadness throughout the movie as for the viewer it's obvious that neither of these characters will come to any good. Every scene of this movie is calculated to draw sympathy for the way these honest, patriotic men are treated by France. And since this movie is mostly a pamphlet, it's successful. But then again, a documentary would have been even more.There are doubts whether it's successful as art, though.

Jamel was an unfortunate choice to play an active front line soldier, given his right arm injury which was obvious from the very start of the movie. Apart from that his performance is the most wooden performance of all the players in a plot that does not seem to take off into the action promised in the sleeve claims! The dialogue and especially the rhetoric of the colonel encouraging the men before they go into battle smacks more of a late forties Russian war film than something from the 21st century. As a vehicle to portray the injustices suffered by the French colonial troops it did manage to go a little along that way, it was especially touching to see the Berbers (Yassir and his mates)unused to the cold in the snow of the Vosges with only sandals on their feet.

I enjoyed the film and I probably would have given it a rating of 8 except for one thing. By the time the halfway point of the movie was reached, I couldn't help but notice that the actor playing Saïd (Jamel Debbouze) always had his right hand in his pocket. Since I was watching it on DVD, I of course had to stop and look him up on IMDb. After finding out that he had no right hand, I was then very distracted through the remainder of the film.I saw that he was a co-producer of the film. I question his judgment of not wearing a prosthetic hand in many of the scenes. Much of the movie took place in cold weather and they were all wearing gloves. Also, in the final scenes, he was the only one in the fire fight using only a hand gun, which looked odd. I just think that having your hand constantly in your pocket is not the best way to disguise this handicap.Harold LLoyd wore a prosthetic glove in many movies after his unfortunate accident when he lost his thumb and forefinger. I'm sure if he walked around with his hand in his pocket all of the time, people would have noticed.