Photo: Tariq Teguia's Rome Rather Than You
Arrogantly conceived, pretentiously executed, and petulantly protracted, the politically-minded road movie Rome Rather Than You will probably strike a lot of people about as exciting as trying to watch The Brown Bunny playing on an SUV TV monitor…from the car behind. The film purports to present the moral atrophy that afflicts modern Algerians, specifically the young generation aiming to take flight somewhere else. (The copious walkouts at the press screening suggested the audience could relate.) All I could gather from the film was that almost everyone in Algeria had pretty much up and left already, as the film's two main characters—working girl Zina (Samira Kaddour) and her boyfriend Kamel (Rachid Amrani)—spend almost the entire film trying to locate Bosco, who has fraudulent passports for their inevitable escape to Europe. Eric Henderson
Arrogantly conceived, pretentiously executed, and petulantly protracted, the politically-minded road movie Rome Rather Than You will probably strike a lot of people about as exciting as trying to watch The Brown Bunny playing on an SUV TV monitor…from the car behind. The film purports to present the moral atrophy that afflicts modern Algerians, specifically the young generation aiming to take flight somewhere else. (The copious walkouts at the press screening suggested the audience could relate.) All I could gather from the film was that almost everyone in Algeria had pretty much up and left already, as the film's two main characters—working girl Zina (Samira Kaddour) and her boyfriend Kamel (Rachid Amrani)—spend almost the entire film trying to locate Bosco, who has fraudulent passports for their inevitable escape to Europe. Eric Henderson
