Imagine Braveheart set in 16th century Algeria, add large dollops of Turkish historical epics and then season with a bit of Daesh training video, and you have The Last Queen, a sumptuously designed costume drama about a semi-legendary sovereign prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice when it means avenging her husband’s death at the hands of fearsome corsair Aruj “Barbarossa.” If that sounds like a lot to take in, it is: co-directors Damien Ounouri and Adila Bendimerad embrace the old-fashioned, blowsy approach to historic stories and they run with it, from massive amounts of slow-mo blood splatter to arch “historicized” dialogue in which every line conveys matters of importance. Designed to resurrect a shadowy female figure from a crucial moment in Algerian history, the film’s relentless approach isn’t designed for the Euro-American art house crowd, and it’s hard to imagine how much sailing it will do before docking at streaming sites.
Few figures of the Renaissance era can match Aruj “Barbarossa” for breathtaking bravado: he was a highly skilled naval commander at the service of the Ottoman sultan who terrorized the Western world with his fleet, racking up success upon astounding success. He’s been treated onscreen before, from Raiders of the Seven Seas (1953) with John Payne and Donna Reed, to last year’s Turkish series Barbaros: Sword of the Mediterranean, each time mythologizing a man whose accomplishments were too vast to capture in anything other than epic proportions. The Last Queen doesn’t try, turning him into a ridiculous simulacrum of seething pulchritude as a foil to a determined queen of Algiers whose desire for vengeance is potentially undermined by Aruj’s intoxicating toxic masculinity.
The time is 1516, and Algiers has just been liberated from the Spanish occupation thanks to the wise rule of King Salim Toumi (Tahar Zaoui). With all the political negotiating he’s been doing lately, he’s had no time to fulfill his duties in the conjugal beds of his two wives, and wife number two, Queen Zaphira (co-director, co-writer and producer Adila Bendimerad), is particularly annoyed at the neglect. Life in the palace is beautiful and all, but a woman has urges that can’t be fulfilled by lounging around the harem pool. Salim is sympathetic but commands patience: he’s trying to build a pan-Arab league against the Spanish, and that takes time. Key to the coalition is an alliance with Aruj (Dali Denssalah), known in the West as Barbarossa, a fearsome corsair whose blood-thirsty band in their Pirates of the Caribbean get-ups send the enemy scrambling.
We’re introduced to Aruj earlier, his roid rage on full display as he hacks his way through useless European soldiers, not stopping when a forearm is lopped off until the blood loss finally makes him collapse. This is a real man. He’s fixed up with a metal prosthetic and is better than new, but when he sees the effete luxury of the Algiers court, not to mention the enticing beauty of its queen, he resolves to win these for himself. Salim is murdered in his hammam and the court flees, including his clever first wife Chegga (Imen Noel), but Zaphira is determined to remain with her young son Prince Yahia (Yanis Aouine), becoming a symbol of brave resistance to her people and a scandal to her father and brothers in a neighboring kingdom, who say that her lack of a male guardian brings shame on the family.
Aruj is a cartoon figure, a wicked brigand who could still fit the 1953 film poster’s catch phrase, “no plunder, no princess escaped this pirate king – the boldest of buccaneers!” Yet we’re in 2022, when even fictional superheroes have more than one defining character trait, so it’s hard to take this guy seriously. Also difficult to stomach is the way Zaphira, despite all her resistance, can’t stop herself from being sexually drawn to this gleaming figure of glorified machismo as her hormones do battle with her sense of duty. So irresistible is this paragon that his Scandinavian former slave Astrid (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) risks all to prevent Aruj from wooing Zaphira.
Visually The Last Queen does have some standout elements, most especially the location shooting and art direction, which despite being overcleaned and brightly, uniformly lit, offers optical pleasures on a large scale. Cinematographer Shadi Chaaban has fun with all the grand spaces, blocking the figures to make use of the geometry, but it’s hard to believe he’s the same d.o.p. who shot Ely Dagher’s beautifully textured, movingly melancholy film The Sea Ahead.
Director: Damien Ounouri, Adila Bendimerad
Screenplay: Adila Bendimerad, Damien Ounouri
Cast: Adila Bendimerad, Dali Denssalah, Tahar Zaoui, Imen Noel, Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Yanis Aouine, Ahmed Zitouni, Tarik Bouarrara, Dimitri Boetto, Tenou Khilouli, Slimane Benouari, Halim Zreibi, Fethi Nouri, Rabih Oudjaout
Producers: Adila Bendimerad, Patrick Sobelman
Co-producers: Hugo Legrand-Nathan, Yacine Medkour, Roger Huang, Justine O.
Cinematography: Shadi Chaaban
Production designer: Feriel Gasmi Issiakhem
Costume designer: Jean Marc Mireté
Editing: Matthieu Laclau, Yann-Shan Tsai
Music: Evgueni, Sacha Galperine
Sound: Amine Teggar, Li Dan-Feng
Production companies: Taj Intaj (Algeria), Agat Films (France), Centre Algérien de Développement du Cinéma – CADC (Algeria), Sofinergie 5 (France), The Red Sea Film Festival Foundation (Saudi Arabia), Yi Tiao Long Hu Bao International Entertainment (Taiwan), Birth (France), 2 Horloges Productions (Algeria), TAICCA – Taiwan Creative Content Agency (Taiwan), Sunnyland (Egypt)
World sales: The Party Film Sales on behalf of Orange Studio
Venue: Venice
In Algerian Arabic, Berber, Corsican, Serbo-Croatian, Finnish, Sabir
113 minutes
