Rebellion

Rebellion (L'Ordre et la Morale, 2011) is Mathieu Kassovitz's war drama, available to watch online on iFILM. A quiet Pacific island turns into a trap with no clean way out for anyone caught inside it.

It's spring 1988 on a French overseas territory. A group of Kanak independence fighters seizes a station of gendarmes and holds the hostages in a jungle cave. Hundreds of troops fly in from Paris. Standing between the two sides is negotiator Philippe Legorjus, played by Kassovitz himself — an elite-unit officer who sees the rebel leader as someone willing to talk, not a terrorist to be wiped out. They come close to a deal. Then the second round of a presidential election back home makes a dramatic assault more useful to certain men than living hostages.

Returning to directing after a long gap, Kassovitz shoots this as a slowly tightening noose, stripped of heroics and triumphant music. Nobody here is clean: there's an order that betrays a conscience, and a man who grasps too late that he was used. A hard, deliberately uncomfortable look at one of modern France's darkest episodes. Stream Rebellion (2011) online on iFILM.