Merzak Allouache's "Salut Cousin!": Immigrants, Hosts, and Parasites

Abstract

Omar Gatlato (1976) was the first fiction film to catapult Algerian filmmaker Merzak Allouache to instant stardom. As Reda Bensmaia and Abderrahmane Djelfaouli have observed, Allouache has repeatedly won acclaim in his homeland by challenging the expectations of Algerian filmmakers and viewing audiences alike.' In France, Allouache's work is not as well known as it deserves to be. However, two of his recent films, Bab el-Oued City (1994) and Salut cousin! (Hello Cousin!, 1996) have earned international renown and it is to this latter work that I will devote my attention in this essay. Salut cousin! focuses on the encounter between Alilo, an Algerian visitor to France, and Mok, the child of Algerian immigrants residing in Paris. The film examines the kind of welcome the latter character is able to grant the former, particularly under circumstances in which the French state, or representatives thereof, hold the power to bar the extension of the kind of hospitality an individual like Mok might be inclined to offer. Allouache appears to suggest that hospitable relations such as those he presents in Salut cousin!, while in some respects successful, are ultimately always doomed to failure, in large part because the two main protagonists are not at liberty to stake out their own positions on the chessboard of international and individual exchange. If the meeting between Mok and Alilo seems to involve a simple differentiation of host and guest, these heroes' ethnic and national identities will ultimately prevent them from freely adopting these roles. Remarkably, the issues Salut cousin! raises regarding the nature of hospitable encounters, both between cultures and within minority communities, are not only central to the film's political and social concerns, but also constitute a sort of metaphorical enactment of the conditions of production and distribution under which Allouache himself was working in the mid-1990s.