FARID BENTOUMI: RED SOIL/ROUGE (2020) - RENDEZ-VOUS WITH FRENCH CINEMA 2021 ZITA HANROT, SAMI BOUAJILA IN ROUGEConflicting loyalties to environment vs. employment divide father and daughterIn this film about conflicts between duty and family, a young woman trained as an occupational nurse, on probation after a death when she's on duty in the ER, gets hired through her father at the small town chemical plant where he's a foreman. Discovering many discrepancies in the health records and suspicious information about the handling of toxic waste, she attempts to blow the whistle in collaboration with a woman journalist. Billed as "un eco thriller
à la Erin Brockovich" in France. Sami Bouajila plays the father, Céline Salete the reporter. Zita Hanrot, Meilleur Espoir Féminin for Bentoumi's first film, the comedy
Good Luck, Algeria, plays the daughter who becomes an activist and whistleblower, and the great Belgian actor Olivier Gourmet is wasted as the factory overlord, Perez.
The director, Farid Bentoumi, has mostly been an actor in TV series before, except for the debut comedy, which also starred fellow French-Algerian Sami Bouajila. This film deals with important issues and conflicts, but it doesn't quite achieve the originality and depth of great French labor issue pictures like Laurent Cantet's
Human Resources and
Time Out. Here the plot resembles that of
Human Resources in depicting how a company divides two generations with different loyalties. The action doesn't really grow tense until the last twenty-five minutes, and then the screenplay ties things up a little too patly.
Red Soil/Rouge, 86 mins., was a selecton of the pandemic-cancelled 2020 Cannes, and played at Bienne (Switzerland), then was one of six films presented in selection as "Cannes 2020" at Deauville. It also showed at various French fests, including the Festival du film franco arabe at Noisy-le-Sec, and at Busan. It was officially released in French cinemas Nov. 25, 2020 but AlloCiné lists no mainstream press reviews, hence no AlloCinee press rating. Some
Télérama "micro-critiques" suggest reactions were mixed, with approval of the movie's passion and direction deemed "promising" but reservations about its didacticism and a plot whose outline feels "déjà vu."