Agonizing escape from Kabul, held captive by the Taliban

It will be a matter of the magnitudeBut how easily French cinema engages with immediate reality and boasts of any small feat in a national key. The director of the recent adaptation ofThe Three Musketeers brings to the screen the real episode of the emergency evacuation of hundreds of Afghan refugees carried out in extremis by a handful of French embassy police officers during the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. Based on the book by the man in charge of the operation, 13 days, 13 nights It takes the point of view of the police commander, a pragmatic veteran about to retire who must deal with the absolute chaos of a broken country, the extreme desperation of Afghan civilians, the threat of the Taliban and the doubts of the other police officers and their superiors.

The film focuses on the French characters and on an American journalist (Sidse Babett Knudsen of Borgen), leaving the Afghan victims in the background, almost reduced to a passive and amorphous mass. If it doesn't completely fall into the colonial cliché of the white savior, it's because the protagonist is a policeman of Algerian origin, played by the great Roschdy Zem, one of the best actors in European cinema today, who leads this film with the serene charisma of a French Gary Cooper. thriller Dramatic filmed with a certain tension and air of western of the border on the penultimate great geopolitical and humanitarian failure of the West.