New Voices in Arab Cinema by Armes Roy;

Author:Armes, Roy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2015-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Two Tunisian-born but Paris-based filmmakers have achieved contrasting forms of success. Abdellatif Kechiche has achieved by far the greatest popular acclaim of any member of this generation, winning a clutch of national and international awards. The lesser-known Karim Dridi, in contrast, has made as many features as any other Arab-born filmmaker of his generation outside Egypt, but only one of these deals with specifically Arab issues.

Abdellatif Kechiche was born in 1960 in Tunis but has worked exclusively in France, where he began as an actor, in the theatre and on-screen, taking leading roles, for example, in Abdelkrim Bahloul’s Mint Tea (1984) and André Téchiné’s The Innocents. Kechiche’s five features have won a host of awards, including the prize for the best first film at the Venice Film Festival, the Palme d’Or at Cannes (in 2013), and two successive sets of Césars (the French domestic equivalent of the Oscars) for best film.

Kechiche began his feature filmmaking career with Blame It on Voltaire / La faute à Voltaire (2000), which opens with a young Tunisian illegal immigrant, Jallel, being coached in how to behave toward the French authorities (talk about liberty, equality and fraternity, praise Voltaire . . . ). Pretending to be an Algerian political refugee, Jallel finds the process of getting a temporary permit (a trifle unconvincingly) easy, and he ends up in an all-male hostel, where he soon makes close friends. Blame It on Voltaire has no great narrative drive, as it moves slowly from one inconclusive situation to another; Kechiche’s real talent seems to be the depiction of group scenes of heavy verbal interaction that get out of hand (a spontaneous dance in a café, a wedding ceremony that doesn’t quite happen, a game of pétanque which goes disastrously wrong), and all these have the air of being very convincingly improvised.

Jallel is a very passive hero. Although he talks about supporting his family back home, his work aspirations do not rise above selling cut-price vegetables in the metro during the daytime and over-priced single roses in cafés in the evening. Jallel’s sexual adventures are portrayed with the (European-style) openness of his expatriate female Arab contemporaries, but with little actual joy. Both of the relationships depicted in the film are characterized by frustration and inhibition. The French waitress and single mother Nassera is attracted to him, but she puts formal limits on their relationship. She agrees to the marriage which would give him resident status, appears in a wedding dress at the ceremony, but at the last moment refuses to go through with it. While Jallel suffers a breakdown which means he must be hospitalized, Nassera vanishes without any explanation from his life and from the narrative. While in the hospital, he embarks on an inconclusive relationship with a second woman, Lucie, who is suffering, it seems, from nymphomania. She rejoins him, pregnant (but not by him), after her release, but their tentative relationship, during which he tries to “cure” her, is cut off abruptly when he is unexpectedly arrested and deported by the police.

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