Days of Glory film review

certificate_12A

DAYS OF GLORY

War is hell, and it's also extremely unfair. This is the message of Rachid Bouchareb's stunning new epic which on any other year would have romped to the Oscar for Best Picture, but was pipped to the post this year by the equally powerful German offering The Lives of Others.

Bouchareb, a French Algerian, tells the true story of how France - beleaguered and almost broken after the Nazi invasion of WWII - turned to the men of its colonised North Africa to try and help them fend off the invading forces. And while the Goumiers, as they were known, helped in their thousands, the motherland was only too happy to treat them as second class human beings.

Countless examples pervade the film, which focuses on a small group of North African friends risking their lives for the war effort. They were given substandard rations, their post was routinely intercepted and they were passed over for promotion. Worst of all, in 1959, the French government froze their pensions so that they received approximately one tenth of the money given to their French national counterparts.

Such is the importance of the film that when President Chirac viewed it, he immediately rescinded this latter injustice - now all surviving veterans are on equal pay.

Bouchareb manages all of this without hectoring or any heavy-handedness: instead this is an entertaining story full of epic battle scenes and personal stories with a first class cast, led by popular comedian Jamel Debbouze and featuring recognisable Franco-Arab actors such as Samy Naceri from the hugely popular Taxi series. Like Michael Haneke's recent Hidden, it allows us to examine the past in a fresh light, and it's undoubtedly one of the most important films of the year.

Paul Hurley