The youngest: love at first sight for the new Hafsia Herzi (critic)
She brilliantly succeeds in her entry into competition with this story of emancipation from a young lesbian of Muslim confession. And reveals a stunning actress: Nadia Melliti.
Hafsia Herzi is in the process of living a year which will necessarily remain apart in its career, even if it already known its share of great vintages. Because, a few months after her Caesar for the best actress to Borgohere she is invited for the first time to participate in the Palme d’Or race, in a Cannes Film Festival where she has so far climbed all the steps (You deserve a love at the criticism week in 2019, Good mother a certain look in 2021) without ever getting your feet in the carpet. And this baptism of fire will remain unforgettable. For her as for us.
A gesture of cinema with great mastery and great purity, extending by still rising several notches which made the salt of his previous films. Its vibrant staging that magnifies faces, looks and bodies. His virtuosity in the art of dialogues. Its ability to distill an irresistible humor within the most tense exchanges, to give them relief, natural and depth. His mastery to orchestrate agitated or danced choral scenes that intimate moments of discovery of flesh and love passion.
Because in this adaptation of the autobiographical novel by Fatima Daas, it is first and foremost a question of love through the account of emancipation and personal construction of a young Muslim woman, Fatima, who loves women. This film, we live with her, through her, her shame, her doubts, her heart packages, her bursts of laughter, her tears her first painful break because incomprehensible for her …
By this bias, Hafsia Herzi avoids all the obligatory passages – confrontation to parents as well as an imam – or rather reinvents them. Take them, both by their positions in the film and by what is said and exchanged there, always far from what we could have foreseen. In doing so, she never locks up her character in a community or a religion. What Fatima crosses, any young woman driven by a religious – Christian, Jewish or other – faith – would cross him by asking the same questions related to the bottom not so much that others can think of her as in contradictions that she lives in her heart.
In the same logic, love, a vibrating heart of the story, goes here first and foremost through kisses and words (irresistible scene of her first date with an older woman than he who initiates her by a sense of her description to the pleasure of the flesh tenfold between women). Not for fear of bodies on the contrary, Hafsia Herzi’s cinema is entirely dedicated to them. But because there again, she places us in the head of her character and therefore her way of living these moments. And succeeds in making it more than ever – therefore to reinvent it – the inheritance of the one she considers as one of her mentors, Abdel Kechiche, who had revealed it with The seed and the mule.
With Kechiche, Hafsia Herzi also shares the sense of casting and the direction of actors, here all amateurs or little experienced on the big screen (including Ji-Min Park, the revelation of Back to Seoul Here are 2 years or Gabriel Donzelli, the son of Valérie Donzelli and Jérémie Elkaïm) and all striking just because in tune in this organic way that Hafsia Herzi to film the group scenes, to distribute the word, to give the feeling that everything is taken on the spot when it is obviously nothing.
And then in the center of this troop, there is the one who plays the title role of The little last. Nadia Melliti whose presence, intensity, charisma illuminate as much as it creates the screen. In chat as in listening. In moments when her character cracks as in those where she takes the lead, in words as in gestures and occupies all the space. More than a simple revelation, an emergence that goes hand in hand with the feeling of accomplishment that we experience here in front of the cinema of Hafsia Herzi. Promise of many others to come in the future!
By Hafsia Herzi. With Nadia Melliti, Ji Min- park, Mouna Soualem … Duration: 1h46. Release on October 1
