Summary
The women reconvene in a garage. A man sets their time bombs and puts them carefully back into each purse. The first woman carries hers to a crowded cafe and orders a cola. The chatter of people enjoying themselves contrasts with the rhythmic music beating in her head. She looks around, seeing the faces of white French children and women. She takes a few sips of her drink and leaves her purse under the bar seat. The blonde woman leaves her purse in a youth dance club full of young people dancing together innocently. The third brings her purse to an airport lounge.
An exterior shot shows the cafe exploding. Bloody people stumble out of the wreckage and dead bodies. People at the youth club hear the explosion and step outside to see what happened. They return inside to dance, saying it was just a gas bottle. However, the next bomb goes off. The same mournful music that played over shots of bodies being carried from the Casbah explosion plays over footage of people carrying bodies out of the club. The third bomb can be heard in the distance, making emergency workers rush away from the second bomb site.
The story moves to January 10, 1957. A crowd of people welcome a military procession for Jean Souro, who is visiting to conduct a meeting about maintaining law and order and combating terrorism in Algeria. The march is led by Philippe Mathieu, a French military lieutenant-colonel who served in the French Resistance of WWII and abroad. In a meeting, he tells his soldiers that not all Arabs are their enemy. It is only a minority.
Mathieu shows hidden-camera footage of Casbah checkpoints, analyzing which people were responsible for the attacks. He says, “It’s an unknown, unrecognizable enemy, which blends in with the people. It is everywhere.” We see the blonde woman briefly captured on film while the soldier flirts with her. He says that it is ridiculous to check papers because the terrorists will certainly have theirs in order. Footage plays of soldiers investigating a box an old man carries. He resists, and the box falls before he picks it up. The soldiers laugh, but Mathieu says, “Maybe the bomb was there, in a false bottom. We’ll never know.”
On a chalkboard, Mathieu explains the FLN’s structure, which is made up of a series of triangles. People are designated as heads of different sectors, and within those sectors, each member elects two other members. This way, each member only knows three other members. Mathieu says they must use interrogation to discover the identity of the chief of the organization. However, they are up against laws that treat the city as a holiday resort, not a battlefield. He says, “We’ve asked for carte blanche, but it’s difficult to get. We need an incident which will legalize our actions and make them feasible. We ourselves must create this opening so our adversaries don’t do it for us, as I believe they might.”
The shot cuts to people passing a note around the Casbah covertly. The voiceover reads of a general strike planned for eight days. A child is then shown handing out newspapers about the strike. The voiceover speaks of the French government’s refusal to allow a UN decision about Algerian independence and its insistence that the FLN represent a minority. The strike is meant to show the French how the people are united with the FLN in their fight for independence from colonial rule. On a rooftop, Mathieu looks through binoculars at the city, smiling. Inside, a group of military leaders are sitting. They decide on Operation Champagne as the title of their plan.
The shot cuts to Djafar and Ali talking as Ali finishes creating the tiled hideout from the beginning of the film. He is pleased with his work. Djafar and Ali go to the roof with another man in glasses (Ben M’Hidi), who gravely addresses the fact Ali was against the idea of striking. The man speaks of every striker being branded as an enemy by the French. He sees the strike as necessary to unite all Algerians in the struggle. He also says that at least the UN will see their strength. M’Hidi says, “You know, Ali, it’s hard to start a revolution. Even harder to continue it. And hardest of all to win it. But it’s only afterwards, when we have won, that the true difficulties begin.” He says there is still much to do.
The scene cuts to French military men standing and waiting. A whistle blows and the soldiers move in formation, firing their weapons and kicking in the doors of residences to round up Algerian men. The men are forced into military transport vehicles. One young man is taken aside from the crowd and asked if he is FLN. He says he isn’t, but the solider orders him to headquarters.
On day four of the strike, a group of journalists confront Mathieu on the steps of the Prefect’s office and ask him questions about the strike. He says it has missed its aim of causing an armed insurrection. He tells them it’s the same progression from terrorism to war that they saw—and lost—in Indo-China. He says that their success depends on the journalists “writing well.”
Analysis
Pontecorvo continues building on the theme of terrorism with the female FLN members going to a male FLN affiliate who sets their time bombs ticking, reminding them they only have twenty-five minutes. In a tense instance of dramatic irony, Pontecorvo shows the women anxiously infiltrating public places full of pieds noirs. The director uses auditory imagery to heighten the tension of the scene, cutting between the ambient noise of a lively café and rhythmic music that expresses the bombers’ internal anguish.
The bombs explode in succession, ensuring that emergency workers are spread thin over three different sites. Significantly, the same music plays over images of limp bodies being carried out of the ruined buildings as played when citizens of the Casbah carried the corpses of children. By matching the mournful music, Pontecorvo draws the viewer's attention to the tit-for-tat nature of the attacks. In retaliation for targeting the most vulnerable and innocent members of the Algerian community, the FLN strikes back by targeting places full of young settlers for whom the issue of Algerian independence has likely been far from their thoughts.
With the conflict spreading through the Algerian community, France brings in Lieutenant-Colonel Philippe Mathieu, a military veteran who took part in the French Resistance against occupying Nazis and fought in French Indochina. In an instance of dramatic irony, Mathieu analyzes surveillance footage of Casbah checkpoints while talking of the enemy hiding in plain sight. The viewer sees what the French soldiers in the room couldn’t possibly know: the female FLN bombers on their way to carry out their retaliation. In this scene, Mathieu makes clear to his subordinates and to the viewer that he is treating the city as a battlefield, and will exploit any opportunity to restrict the civil rights of Algerians.
Pontecorvo returns to the themes of revolution and solitary with the FLN-organized general strike. While Ali is against the idea, FLN co-founder Ben M’Hidi speaks with him about the need to sustain their revolutionary movement. Beyond assassinations and terror bombings, the FLN needs to show its strength and unity to the international community with a wide-scale strike of workers who sympathize with the FLN’s fight for independence. M’Hidi sees such an act of collective solidarity as necessary to achieving their goal of the Algerian population being united against the French.
The theme of the influence of media also arises in relation to the general strike. M’Hidi understands that the strike will make headlines and garner international attention for their cause. Mathieu, too, understands the power of the media to shape the narrative of the conflict. In a scene in which he jokes with reporters, Mathieu states plainly that the success of his campaign depends on the journalists “writing well”—i.e. writing stories that cast the French in a positive light and smear the FLN as an extremist fringe who have no right to speak for the people of Algeria. As the viewer will see later, the media’s treatment of the conflict proves crucial as the French lose support from other hegemonic Western countries to continue their occupation of Algeria.
