Baya of the Mountains

Revenge is drama's oldest and guiltiest pleasure and a mainstay of popular cinema. It takes strange shape, however, in Algerian director Azzedine Meddour's 1997 period epic. Talk about delay of gratification -- a lifetime passes before we're reminded that there's a bad guy waiting to get his. At the beginning, Baya (Djamila Amzal), a legendary beauty who ran off to marry a poor Berber, scrounges through a misty potato field with her fellow villagers for sustenance. They've been uprooted by the local feudal lord, whose son, an old flame of hers, kills Baya's husband. The villagers settle down to transform a barren mountain into a viable new community, and Baya patiently raises her son to avenge his father's death. She's a feminist rebel of sorts, if a passive-aggressive one.

A knowledge of 19th-century Algerian history would help in following all this, as Meddour's efforts at exposition and narrative tend to be clumsy. In detail and imagery, though, he demonstrates a shrewd eye. The arduous process of planting wheat in unyielding soil that we see makes the lush harvest that follows all the more satisfying. And the repeated images of lanterns floating downstream and sunlight pouring into sealed rooms tell more than the tale itself of the cost and reward of desire too long denied.

-- Peter Keough