“Until the Birds Return” opens with a car cruising down a winding, sun-dappled city street. This image becomes the connective tissue between three otherwise divergent stories in Karim Moussaoui’s tender, ruminative drama about life in contemporary Algeria.
In the first chapter, a property developer, Mourad (Mohamed Djouhri), witnesses an act of violence after his car breaks down at night. Later, the focus switches to his chauffeur, Djalil (Mehdi Ramdani). He drives his neighbors to the wedding of their daughter, Aïcha — who happens to be his former lover. The focus shifts yet again when Aïcha (Hania Amar) and her family find a doctor, Dahman, stranded on the road. The final chapter follows Dahman (played with delicate restraint by Hassan Kachach) as he’s confronted with a terrible incident from his time in the Algerian Civil War.
Moussaoui, making his feature debut, relates these stories at a gentle and idiosyncratic pace. Although each chapter is built around an event — a tryst or a revelation — the film comes to life in quiet, conversational details that capture the textures of people’s lives across different generations and classes. A highlight: a farmer and his son, glimpsed briefly in the film’s second section, debating the concept of private property.
Occasional musical interludes interrupt the movie’s associative rhythms, including a song-and-dance routine set against the gorgeous Aurès mountains and shot with dynamic, careening camerawork by David Chambille. These sequences can feel digressive, but it’s all part of Moussaoui’s keenly observed portrait of individual and collective existence. As its characters traverse the country’s crisscrossing motorways, “Until the Birds Return” locates the singular moments that form the nodes of a shared national history.
Until the Birds Return
Not rated. In Arabic and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes and other streaming platforms and pay-TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
