French Cinema: Indigines (Days of Glory) (2006)

(contains spoilers)  There is nothing especially new in this film that you haven't seen in other war films such as for example "Saving Private Ryan" only those were Americans fighting the Germans in Normandy and this features North African French colonials doing the same in Italy and then in Alsace.   As in that film, here eventually most of them die in a shootout in a wrecked village and the lone survivor visits his dead comrades years later in a military cemetery full of row after row of markers.  .

It is an ensemble cast, a platoon, all established French actors of North African origin this time.   It points up the universals of war, but also lightly treads on the ambivalence which the French felt towards their colonials.  Shortly after the Free French and Americans liberated French North Africa from the Vichy French collaborators, the Free French started recruiting men from North Africa to help fight the Germans and Italians and to liberate France itself.    That these were Arabic speaking colonials did not matter.  In the egalitarian spirit of France, all were citizens of France, but as it turns out, the liberal rhetoric only went so far. 

One of them  acquires a French sweetheart in Marseilles before they move farther north into Southern France but his letters to her were not delivered because the Army postal censor simply did not approve of a North African carrying on a relationship with a French woman.   There is also the implication that the colonials were sent in to do the hard fighting while the

French troops sweep in later on to claim the laurels of victory.  In one poignant scene, the lone survivor of his platoon, Abdelkader, tries to convey to a French officer riding by in a Jeep that his whole unit is dead and the officer says, well, okay, this other unit needs a corporal, join them.  And he's off.  Meanwhile the army photographer is is taking a picture of some white soldiers posing with the happy liberated townspeople.  After all they did, and saw, nobody really knows and nobody really cares, they get a pat on the back and a cup of coffee.  

Years later Abdelkader visits the cemetery where his comrades are buried before returning to his little apartment nearby.  The epilogue, appearing silently on the screen explains how in 1959 when the French colonies were breaking away, the military pensions promised to those in those colonies were "frozen" and it was not until 2002 that court decision restored those pensions. 

It was all in all a satisfying movie, not without certain cliches (four men fighting the whole of the German Army?) repeating the old theme of a nation's insufficient gratitude for the sacrifices its soldiers made.