FADE IN: A NOTE ON LANGUAGE: All dialogue is in French unless otherwise noted. Arabic is indicated when spoken. INT. FORWARD OPERATING BASE, CANTEEN, AURÈS MOUNTAINS, ALGERIA, DAWN A low concrete room with no windows. Wooden tables, metal trays, the smell of chicory coffee and canvas and men who slept in their boots. A radio on a shelf plays a French chanson from a station in Algiers, the signal breaking apart in the mountains so the singer's voice arrives in pieces, a woman singing about summer through a curtain of static. RÉMY LASSALLE (35) sits alone at the end of a table. He is lean, angular, the kind of face that does not photograph well because there is nothing in it for the camera to hold. Close cropped hair the color of wet sand. A scar runs along his right jawline, thin and old, the kind that stops being noticed by the man who carries it. He wears no uniform. Khaki shirt, canvas trousers, boots that have been resoled twice. He drinks coffee from a tin cup and does not look at anyone. Around him, Legionnaires eat. They are young and not young, French and not French. A German corporal butters bread with his thumb. A Spanish private reads a letter and mouths the words. A Senegalese sergeant eats standing because the bench is full. They do not look at Rémy either. He exists in their space the way a locked cabinet exists in a room: present,