Apaches

Actor-turned-director Thierry de Peretti's low-key, straightforward youth tragedy is set in the filmmaker's native Corsica, here portrayed as a resort-island community in which a permanent underclass (mostly ethnic-Arab north African) services the elite, super-rich socialites from France who come to vacation or rent. Aziz (Aziz El Hadachi), the teenage son of a family who cleans and maintains a luxury villa, uses the new (French) owner's absence as an opportunity to hold a small house party with a few friends and hangers-on. Unfortunately, some of the young people help themselves to household possessions, including a stereo, some music CDs, and a few expensive hunting rifles. The latter prove to be too "hot" to fence in the local outlaw subculture, but their lethal presence serves as a ticking reminder of the guilt, fear, and mistrust that begins to gnaw away at the boys. Told without major histrionics or sensation, in a Bressonian-sober moral-fable fashion, Apaches is a powerful foreign film. Recommended. (C. Cassady)