Il Primo Uomo or Le Premier Homme or The First Man is a study of rhythm of editing, and length of framing and pacing in filmmaking.

It was around 4 years back when I discovered Le Premier Homme, the unfinished auto-biographical novel by Albert Camus. It was the same time when I had to watch Gianni Amelio's movie based on the same text. Depicting Camus and his works on film has always been a challenge. None but Visconti's The Stranger and David Oelhoffen’s Far from Men are the only ones which did justice to the emotions conveyed by Camus's text. Le Premier Homme is a different type of movie. A movie where time stands still and makes you feel the passing of time. My initial reaction after finishing the film was simply this - "How can someone make a four hour long movie and still hold the audience captive in the Arab-French turmoil in Algeria."

And well, the movie was only 90 mins long. It represents an experience in itself which I personally had not witnessed ever before and still haven't witnessed yet in any other piece of cinema. Time stood still with Jacques Cormery and his conflict of being torn in Arab-French Algeria. Is he a Parisian, is he an Algerian, who is he to identify with in this war which has shook the land where he grew up?

The film is a serious adaptation for what Camus stood for and it is as true as it gets to the source material. As much as the director is to be applauded for the pacing of the film, so should be Jacques Gamblin who plays Jacques Cormery with such sombre and a look of thoughtfulness on his face. He is in every scene, and it is his movement and body language that make this movie stop time. Jacques’ mother too is portrayed with that sad hope. It really does make me compliment the brilliant casting choices made throughout this movie. Maya Sansa plays a young Catherine Cormery, Jacques’ mother. She barely has ten or more dialogues but the grace under pressure that her screen presence creates is something words can never do justice.

The film opens with a good one and half minute long sequence to help us find the grave of Cormery’s father. It doesn’t feel like a minute and half, the long take gives the impression that we have lived all these years with Jacques and like him too we don’t know his father. There is such sadness in each sequence that sometimes the book fails to deliver the same impact. This movie is a very silent one albeit it does have a lot of dialogues. There is a scene that I especially would like to highlight when Cormery meets his mother. There is no way I can express the interaction of this scene, cause there are dialogues but the real talking is done through the eyes. The coverage of Cormery’s youth is depicted without hasten. The runtime is equally shared between Cormery’s youth and our present Cormery. Cormery is visiting Algeria and we see Algeria with him, we are as equal a tourist as Jacques Gamblin’s Cormery. We also see Algeria changing right in front of our eyes. We see the conflict between the French-Algerians and Arab-Algerians erupt in front of our eyes. When young Jacques is being beaten by his grandmother, the camera cut to Jacques mother as she closes her eyes at the whip of the beating. The pain of the Cormery family rings true, especially to someone like me who is brought up in a third world country where beating the young kids is a common practice to teach them the values of life. Let’s take another scene – a young Cormery cheats the butcher but later confesses it to his grandmother and informs her that he lied because he lost the money while taking a poop. His grandmother, due to the astute poverty they face, shoves her hand down the latrine to retrieve the pennies. An angered but guilt ridden young Jacques looks at her as he takes out a magazine from under his shirt that he bought with those two pennies he lied about. The camera first shows the helpless grandmother and then zooms in slowly on young Jacques.

There are two speeches that Jacques Cormery gives, one at the beginning of the film and the other near the end of the film. The first one is in front of a hostile audience in the lecture hall of the college where he once was a student. He asks his audience to see the Arabs as the one similar to the French. He himself is French yet sympathetic to the Arabs. He is conflicted, a classic Camus character, yet that internal conflict is not apparent in his speech. The second speech is the one that he gives on a radio, alone and without any external interference. He is free to speak his views about the course of humanity through the French-Arab conflict. In both cases, true to Camus’s idea of Sisyphus, the result of both speeches remains fairly similar. And the director doesn’t shy away from letting the editing make us feel the uselessness of such speeches that Jacques Cormery might be feeling despite having his best intentions to bring a change through his words.

My affection to this movie may be purely personal but not because I love Camus, but because the world that Jacques inhabits seems a little more real to my childhood. And this reality was something that I was unable to find in the novel Le Premier Homme. The visual representation is complemented by the lack of background score in a lot of scenes. This is one such movie where the lacks of cinematic elements lift the storytelling of the movie for a heart-warming experience.