THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT

The year 1999 sees the opening of the most expensive home production in the history of French cinema – a live-action version of the cartoon character Asterix the Gaul. Sound sadly familiar? Perhaps it will take daringly low-budget indie flicks like THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT to steer France awa from faux Hollywood bloat and back to the vibrant New Wave spring of Truffaut and Godard, whose breakthrough “Breathless” this film most stylistically resembles. Nervous camerawork, a defiantly roving narrative, and naturalistic performances hallmark Mama Ke?ta's punchy tale of three outlaws on their way to a reckoning. Mouss, desperately ill and realizing he has little time, locks his wife in a bathroom and sets out to right a wrong he committed 20 years ago. His ex-partner Thomas, finally released from prison, finds himself being shadowed by the third protagonist, an earnest youth named Thomas, whose guileless exterior conceals a motive as serious and deadly as a pistol in a pocket. Like a mirror shattering in reverse, the jagged pieces of narrative come together in the climax to reflect the whole. (In French with English subtitles)