MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Overseas’ a Critique of Colonialism

Thirty-five minutes into “Overseas” (at the Royal), French filmmaker Brigitte Rouan pulls off a shocker. Up to that time the film seems like many other movies about Colonials trying to deceive themselves that their privileged world is going to go on forever. It is a traditional world where large wealthy families live in mansions attended by native servants, where its young women are caught up in a round of parties, their key concern being a suitable marriage.

The world of Algeria in the 1940s and ‘50s that Rouan transports us to has very real parallels with that of the Old South in “Gone With the Wind.”

Right away we assume that Zon (Nicole Garcia), the eldest of three sisters, is going to be the film’s dominant figure, as much a flirt as Scarlett O’Hara as she dances an extremely erotic tango, enraging her husband, a naval officer, whose propriety has been offended more even than his jealousy has been aroused. He is much of the time off to sea, leaving Zon pregnant practically every time he returns. However, we are not at all prepared for what happens to Zon next.

Rouan and her principal co-writer, Philippe Le Guay (who also plays one of the husbands), have had a great stroke of inspiration in giving all three sisters equal time. Once Zon’s story, which ends in the ‘50s, is told, “Overseas” returns to its opening shot, with the three sisters deplaning in Algiers, 1946, to focus on the middle sister Malene (played by Rouan herself). Each sequence we move forward a few years in time, drawing us ever closer to the Algerian Revolution.

Going over the same period of time from three different perspectives allows us to see the three sisters in three dimensions while at the same time permitting the plight of Algeria itself to emerge gradually, along with the sisters’ varying attitudes toward it.

As lovely and gracious as Zon is, she is a reactionary, absorbed entirely in her husband and children, indifferent to the Algerians entirely. Malene’s attitudes are much like Zon’s, but because her husband is a bemused indolent, she must run their large farm, which means she confronts directly the hostility of the underpaid native workers. In contrast to her older sisters, the voluptuous Gritte (Marianne Basler), who works as a nurse--her father won’t hear of her being a doctor--not only rejects two eminently desirable suitors but even risks an affair with an Algerian just as hostilities break out.

Filmed in Tunisia, “Overseas” is at once a film of charm and substance, intimate and sensual in the French tradition, and a touching family chronicle that is in fact semi-autobiographical. But it is much more than this because Rouan is able to draw from her own experience not only a deeply felt personal memoir but an implicit criticism of a colonial system that proscribed rigidly the lives of both the men and women of the foreign ruling class as it cruelly oppressed the native population.

On another level “Overseas” (Times-rated Mature, for sex, nudity, adult themes), is unabashedly, unapologetically, even amusingly a woman’s picture. Whereas the three sisters are each so distinctive and so gallantly played by Garcia, Rouan and Basler, the men in their lives are very nearly interchangeable, so similar in their lithe handsomeness and conventional points of view that we have a hard time telling them apart.

‘Overseas’

Nicole Garcia: Zon

Brigitte Rouan: Malene

Marianne Basler: Gritte

An Aries Films release of a Paradise Productions presentation. Director Brigitte Rouan. Producer Serge Cohan-Solal. Screenplay by Rouan, Philippe Le Guay, Christian Rullier, Cedric Kahn. Cinematographer Dominique Chapuis. Editor Yann Dedet. Costumes Florence Emir, Danielle Laffargue. Music Pierre and Mathieu Foldes. Art director Roland Deville. Sound Dominique Hennequin. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

Times-rated Mature (for sex, nudity, adult themes).