By Chrysalide,
Omar Gatlato is a 1976 Algerian drama film directed by Merzak Allouache. It was entered into the 10th Moscow International Film Festival where it won the Silver Prize.
With his first film, Merzak Allouache accurately captured the daily realities of young Algerians living in the capitol city of Algiers fourteen years after the country had gained its independence from France. Omar Gatlato and his friends struggle with boredom, machismo and the impossibility of developing meaningful relationships with the women around them. Allouache’s effective use of real settings and the dialect of the Algerian street made this film enormously popular with the Algerian movie-going public. The success of Omar Gatlato opened the door to a new group of films that were able to portray the daily realities of Algerian society. Two years after the success of Omar Gatlato, Allouache was able to direct the equally uncompromising Adventures of a Hero (1978), taking Algerian cinema further towards a new realism.
Omar is a young and lively, rather macho Algerian who holds a good job in the Department of Frauds and lives in a crowded apartment with his sisters, his mother and grandparents. He loves to listen to chaabi music and Indian music, to party with his friends, and to dream about women.
A small, vaguely comical‐looking man in his late 20’s begins speaking directly to the camera, explaining the routine of his daily life and introducing his friends. Every day, he ‘tells us, he must grudgingly stop and talk with the neigborhood butcher “so he wont slip me any ewe meat.”
This Omar (Boualem Benani) is cheerful fellow, even though nothing in his life particularly justifies his optimism. He works at a dull office job, swims at a crowded public beach near an industrial plant and lives in shabby modern apartment complex, which director Merzak Allouache immediately compares with a lodal cemeiery. Omar’s only prized possession is his tape recorder, which he carries everywhere and plays constantly, even in the small bedroom he shares with his sister and her grimy children.
One night Omar is robbed, and the tape recorder is stolen, so his burly friend Moh finds him a replacement. The new machine has a used tape inside, a recording by a woman who is as lnnely and unsatisfied as Omar himself. He plays the tape over and over, and becomes obsessed with the idea of meeting her. This story of unrequited loye provides the film with its only real plot, but it is not nearly as compelling as the portraits of Omar, his friends, and their workaday world.
“Your life is rather dull,” a machine tells Omar, when he pays it to tell his fortune. For relief, he goes to the movies (where we see a fascinating film clip from an Indian musical), attends variety shows, and goes to weddings to hear the music (Abdelkader Chaou, a singer seen performing several times, has a lovely face and a haunt; ing self‐assurance). He visits gaming tables and watches soccer. He also hangs around with his buddies, an unusually diverse‐looking bunch who .share little more than their communal squalor. Few of Omar’s friends look healthy or clean; a couple of them, when they eat, have a way of winding up with food in their hair.
“Omar Gatlato’s deadpan narration belies the uncertainty and anger of his generation, which is beleaguered with problems of reconstruction and alienation.” – Lawrence Chua, Village Voice
A watershed film, Omar Gatlato holds a mirror up to Algerian male culture…and the mirror cracks. The title refers to
the expression “gatlato al-rujula”—or, roughly, “machismo killed him”—and the film’s mordant insights into male posturing and alienation in Algerian society animate this bit of folk wisdom.
In mock documentary style, a young man recounts with wry commentary a typical day in his life in the Bab el-Oued quarter of Algiers, while the camera playfully shows a different story. In following Omar and his friends in their pursuit of happiness, the film examines with shrewd humor the gang values of urban youth—their passion for popular culture (soccer, “Hindoo” movies, Rai concerts); their hidden fear of women; their social insecurity in an environment where they are marginalized.
“Omar Gatlato (1976), [Merzak Allouache’s] first feature film, set in the neighborhood of Bab el-Oued in Algiers, was such a success that it changed the course of Algerian cinema. The popularity of Omar Gatlato with Algerian audiences demonstrated to the Algerian film industry that its public had an appetite for complex films that dealt with the realities of Algerian contemporary society, opening the door to other films of the same ilk.” – Harvard Film Archive
from different sources: Wikipedia.org , dohafilminstitute.com. nytimes.com
