Tahar Kessi’s “The Outlandish” (Amsevrid, 2024) is an endlessly perplexing and fascinating examination of guilt and oblivion that wends through time without the bind of linearity. There are no chronological clues or determinants. It flows with an unruly mechanics of its own, wholly indifferent to an unsuspecting viewer who may not be very well-equipped if he or she is more versed in narrative rhythms.
This is strictly and passionately an anti-narrative film, even if it courts the tendency to apply a sense of structure and circularity. The film moves about, unmoored and freely wandering. There are no circumscribing edges to it. Kessi propels a spirit of effortless, unanchored traveling through a density of archives to eke out and establish rebellion and protest.
This is a film of resonances and echoes, spilling across a vastness of time. The past and present don’t have many dividers. Underpinning both is a commonality of oppression and recognizing the power to unambiguously assert an oppositional stance that doesn’t bend easily. One such figure from the past, S.K., becomes the point through which we foray into the Algerian political past, reaching back to the nineties and the present.
S.K. has the presence of a ghost, but traces and remnants of him litter the archives, which are, in a slow and deliberate fashion, pulled to the fore. The sense of mystery-making and its leisurely unraveling in the film is exquisite. Just the elaborate, extravagant patience with which it is wrought is a rarity that genuinely befuddles and startles the senses. History abides by no rules. It is a relentless, manic swirl. Epic scale and sweep of time and its churn are as unavoidable as are the speck-like yet substantive voices that dare to make its resistance abundantly clear.
It is interesting to note that the film persistently dislodges easy associations. In fact, it is specifically set against them. We witness a lot of archival records of demonstrations. The rage and despair against government brutality of varied degrees are absolute, unbending, and pointed. Yet, the directionality of protest is more diffuse and spread out than spun to one particular end. That’s what the film takes umbrage at. Kessi is insistent on expanding and broadening our gaze, not clipping it to fit only one window of time or one facet of protest.
This liberating spirit consistently enhances the film’s eye of inquiry, splicing in television footage, news clippings, and segues of all kinds, including snippets of women at work. Despite the heaviness of intent that wraps the film, the songs the women sing, functioning as a memorializing instrument, lighten the mood even though they mine tragic, intense injustices that have not received due redressal or acknowledgment.
“Amsevrid” treads a maddening, often bewildering gamut of unmanned ideas and interests. It merges forms, leaping without immediate cues between a political thriller and a daze-infused, experiential excavation of buried traumas and unresolved anguish. Many answers are missing, and the film is grounded enough to let those waft in the air rather than scurry for definite solutions.
This is why it is able to jump tracks, switching elegantly and with disorienting thrust between overt action and the phantasm of the experienced and forgotten. Both are critical and indispensable to make the entirety reverberate with compact, resolute logic and stirring, troubling undertones.
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