With nearly half a century of filmmaking under his belt since his first film, Omar Gatlato (1976), prolific Algerian filmmaker Merzak Allouache returns to the Toronto International Film Festival (after Divine Wind [+leggi anche:
recensione
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scheda film], TIFF 2018) with his 19th feature, Front Row. In this very brightly coloured comedy, which enjoyed its premiere in the festival’s Centrepiece strand, we are witness to the fallout of the rivalry between two bickering matriarch nemeses when they both take their families to the beach for the day. Front Row bears crowd-pleasing qualities for families who are intimately familiar with these sorts of situations but otherwise lands with a dull thud in its quest for laughs.

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Waking up practically at the crack of dawn, Zohra Bouderbala (Fatiha Ouared) and her five children head to the beach for a sunny day of relaxation, intending to be the first to arrive in order to secure the eponymous prime oceanside spot under a cooling set of umbrellas and UV-blocking fabrics. Despite arriving to a beach packed shoulder to shoulder, Safia Kadouri (Bouchra Roy) and her similarly large family convince persuadable young beach attendant Hakim (Nabil Asli) to grant them a spot directly in front of the Bouderbalas, igniting a beachfront brawl, both verbal and physical, between the two rival families. Love blossoms between the older siblings of each family, while further chaos ensues when both Zohra's paramour Lounès (Idhir Benaïbouche) and husband Mokhtar (Kader Affak) show up, fanning the flames of drama.

Front Row never reaches all-out farce, but from the start, Allouache gives everything to making his world as raucous as possible without taking the film too far away from realism, with more conventionally dramatic lensing by Mohamed Tayeb Laggoune. The Bouderbalas pull out all the stops, including cutting vegetables and cooking meat for a full family meal under the brightly coloured parasols, made to fit an overly saturated visual scheme — the filmmaker asks us not to take the feuding too seriously. A mid-film fight that sends all the adults to the police station sees the families tumbling all over each other with a Tati-esque sensibility, yet Allouache employs few other physical gags. This mish-mash of genre signalling becomes slightly off-putting, leaving viewers with an unsettled chuckle rather than a true guffaw.

Muzak-esque music — with a bizarre, MIDI-based quality — in a score by David Hadjadj and Jérôme Perez accompanies sequences, almost acting as sound effects rather than traditional scoring. While this choice somehow fits the bright and bubbly visual and narrative tone of the film, it often feels intrusive, as if opening new scenes in a laugh-tracked sitcom. However, Front Row also takes a drastic tonal shift toward drama near its denouement, intending to reflect more pensively on what the film says about Algerian society: about interfamilial drama, star-crossed lovers, and the dream to leave the nation’s sociopolitical system by moving abroad. While these elements come far too late in the film to sink in, theuy do raise questions about Allouache's intentions from the start: maybe this uneasy comedy is better read as a social drama with laughs.

Front Row is a co-production between Algeria's Baya Films, Algeria's Alpha Tango Studio and France's Les Asphofilms, supported by Saudi Arabia's Red Sea Fund.