Sofia

Director Meryem Benm‘Barek-Aloïsi

The director at Cannes flanked by actresses Sarah Perles (left) and Maha Alemi

SOFIA            B                    

Morocco  France  Qatar  Belgium  (80 mi)  2018  ‘Scope  d:  Meryem Benm‘Barek-Aloïsi

A blistering piece of social realism that may leave you reeling afterwards, as this first-time director takes viewers on a whirlwind tour of what it’s like to live under religious Islamic rule, where common sense is no longer applicable, as harsh repressive punishment awaits those that can’t follow the letter of the law.  Viewers are informed at the outset that childbirth outside of wedlock is punishable by a prison sentence unless the father claims it as his, as sex is only allowed between married couples.  Of interest, Morocco is actually among the more liberal Muslim nations, with its longtime colonial ties with French culture and language, which is still spoken there alongside Arabic.  The director herself grew up in Rabat, the capital city of Morocco, was educated in Paris and Brussels and now lives in Paris, winner of the Best Screenplay award in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, the film exposes the consequences of the archaic laws, which only grows more absurd as the film progresses.  Opening in a celebratory mood in an upscale apartment in Casablanca, where the father (Faouzi Bensaïdi) of a middle class family is entering into a business partnership with a wealthy Frenchman, Ahmed (Mohamed Bousbaa), asking his 20-year old daughter Sofia (Maha Alemi) to serve the desert, when her cousin Lena (Sarah Perles) notices in the kitchen that she’s in some distress.  As a medical student, Lena quickly realizes something is wrong, where a brief exam suggests she’s pregnant, but Sofia ignores her, attending to her serving duties until her water breaks, with Lena quickly rushing her to a hospital on the pretext that they’re just going to a pharmacy, but the hospital won’t deliver the baby if she’s unmarried, public or private, fearing fines and harsh punishments of their own, leaving her in limbo.  Lena finds a doctor on staff that she knows who will secretly deliver the baby off the books, where she must leave immediately afterwards, but the father must claim the child within 24 hours or Sofia will be charged with a crime and sent to prison.  Sofia is but one of 150 unwed women who give birth in Morocco daily (Our Bodies, Our Sons: A Complicated Moroccan Parental Connection ...).  Welcome to the new Casablanca without Ingrid Bergman or Humphrey Bogart.   

While the baby is healthy, this only begins their mad journey through a labyrinth of arcane customs and laws, where it’s not so easy for Sofia to recall the location of the father, getting lost in the seedy section of Derb Sultan, seemingly walking forever with no success, with Lena pressing Sofia for more details.  The two women are exact opposites, as Lena is gentle and sympathetic, offering help, while the crestfallen Sofia continually demonstrates a sullen demeanor.  When they appear to find the right address, the inhabitants grow suspicious, so Sofia barges right in, but no young man is present, exiting without success.  As they sit in a nearby staircase reflecting on their options, making excuses over the phone for why they have not returned home, an idea occurs to Sofia that they can just leave the baby on the street and no one will ever know how she got there, searching for a box from the garbage to put her in.  Lena looks at her incredulously, like she’s out of her mind (24 babies are abandoned daily in Morocco) before discovering her parents have been to the hospital and know exactly what happened, heading back home to meet them where the grave mood is overly somber and grim, devastated by the news, believing this will bring great shame to the family.  After a night to sleep on it, they head out to meet the father the next day, identified as Omar (Hamza Khafif), where he claims he never touched her, meeting her only one time and he just offered her a cup of coffee when he found her distraught and in tears after losing her job at a call center because her French was inadequate.  Nonetheless, after some parental wheeling and dealing (thoughts of bribing police were mentioned), they both end up before a magistrate, with Omar acknowledging paternity while agreeing to marry Sofia, but the look on his face is utter shock and disbelief, like he’d been handed a death sentence, while Sofia is surprisingly upbeat, happy that there’s no jail time for anyone, as the agreement reached seems to accommodate both sides.   

Part of the untold story here is the class difference between the two families, one educated and well off, living in a modern house, while the other is stuck in a ghetto with few prospects of ever getting out.  Both resort to cynical plans afterwards, as the wealthy family intends to hide the baby until after the wedding, as no one needs to know, so no shame will be brought down upon the family, or interrupt the planned business partnership, while a good job will be offered to the prospective husband, which will elevate that family’s economic standing as well.  Throughout the film Sofia has been portrayed as an overly passive traumatized victim, speaking little, instead wearing that hurt expression on her face, where the repressive patriarchal laws are viewed as demeaning and humiliating to women, who aren’t even recognized as human beings, with Sofia treated like a criminal throughout the entire ordeal.  But as her wedding approaches, with her family sparing no expense, turning this into a lavish, high society event, she becomes more outspoken and selfishly motivated, sneering at those that helped her, thinking they’re no better than her, obviously enjoying all the attention being paid to her, where she envisions herself as a beautiful young bride, though Omar has made it clear under no uncertain terms that love will never enter into this marriage.  In the course of events Sofia lets out a little secret that completely alters the outcome, subtly changing the overall dynamic, shifting the viewer’s perspective, and making a mockery of the proceedings.  The moral hypocrisy on display is stunning, revealing just how easily people adapt to their circumstances, but no one addresses the real issue, which is the insidious law itself that traps women and places them in a demeaning and medically precarious position.  So if the laws remain, society will have to adjust, and this is but one example of an overly corrective method that reeks of self-protection.  In the end, cynically turning the tables to her advantage, Sofia is just another spoiled and ungrateful rich kid getting what she wants, even if it’s all a lie.    

Nenette and Boni (Nénette et Boni)

NENETTE AND BONI (Nénette et Boni)       B+       
France  (103 mi)  1996  d:  Claire Denis

One of the director’s more most sensitive, humane and accessible films, what initially appears to be a pair of mismatched lovers only becomes revealed as brother and sister a half hour into the film, where Nénette (Alice Houri) and Boni (Grégoire Colin) share a troubled past, where both have grown distant from living apart following the separation of their parents, each living with a different parent, culminating with the death of their mother, where Boni is living in her house.  Both earlier played siblings in Denis’s made-for-French-TV film U.S. GO HOME (1994), reunited here as title characters, a constantly embroiled brother and sister living in Marseilles.  Much of their relationship is expressed through constant bickering, often turning ugly, where the one thing they both share is a uniform hatred of their father (Jacques Nolot).  While the film is shot in a social realist style, where it could just as easily be a product of the Dardennes brothers, it also contains abruptly strange mood shifts, where we hear 19-year old school dropout Boni go through his rape and domineering masturbation ramblings from his diary entries about forcefully screwing the neighbor’s wife, where he has a fixation on the beautiful baker’s wife (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, gentle, gorgeously quirky, never better).  When his raging male hormone teen sex fantasies blend seamlessly into the real life of his daily visits to the bakery, it casts an absurdly humorous skew throughout the entire film, especially when the vernacular of his sex fantasies becomes intertwined into the bakery world itself, often breaking into utter fantasy sequences, Bakery Scene from Nenette et Boni YouTube (3:27).  Ironically Boni’s lustful gaze is counteracted by the director’s own eroticization of Boni, who often becomes the subject of an exploratory pan or a gorgeously held shot.  15-year old Nénette, on the other hand, has escaped from boarding school, where the opening sequence in the pool, especially scored by the Tendersticks, plays out like a reverie of momentary calm quickly interrupted by a harshly intruding reality, Tindersticks - Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009 Nenette et Boni  YouTube (2:29), as she spends much of the film as a street urchin, having to fend for herself in a hostile environment.

The explosively charged opening rant sets the tone for the film, which is layered in a relentlessly dreary existence, much of it set in the financially troubled world of the streets where Boni sells pizzas out of a truck, while he and his gang of friends also invest heavily in black market merchandise, resulting in a reverently adored coffeemaker that becomes his most prized possession.  The criminal underworld extends to his father’s business as well, where one of the givens of the film is financial insecurity, once more blending into the emotional instability of the characters.  Boni actually kicks out his rebellious sister, even after learning she’s pregnant, showing the heartlessness of his situation.  What is quickly realized is that both are essentially alone, two emotionally damaged misfit kids without any real support, living a minimal existence in a house that never has any food, where in an awkward way, he begins to care and feel protective of her.  Once he realizes she’s actually 7-month’s pregnant, viewing an ultrasound photo confirming there’s a real baby inside, he develops a strangely fascinating curiosity, which surprisingly becomes the most profoundly affecting aspect of the story, becoming an unsentimental and totally unpredictable emotional journey.  Having nowhere else to go, refusing to return to or even see her father, Nénette poignantly explores her deceased mother’s bedroom, which prompts grainy flashback images of a happier youth that feels all too brief.  As they warily begin to accept one another, the camera’s exploratory gaze offers a hint of their previous relationship with a memorable shot that begins on Boni’s head and shoulders as he sleeps, slowly panning down until we see both he and Nénette’s feet sticking out at the end of the bed, humorously contrasting in size, where one gets the sense that they used to sleep like this in their earlier years.  The film’s rhythm and structure is of paramount interest, as the overriding mood of bleak reality constantly breaks into moments of excruciating tenderness, where perhaps the ultimate irony is seeing Vincent Gallo (the baker), usually seen as such an aggressively macho guy become such a gentle and loving soul, where his wife is the adoring object of his gazing affections, beautifully scored to the Beach Boys “God Only Knows” Nenette et Boni Scene YouTube (1:53).  Part of the little treasures of the film is the audience knowing Boni’s fierce sexual obsessions that he keeps to himself while neither the baker nor his wife have any knowledge whatsoever, knowing Boni only as a customer, always treating him with kindness and respect.  

A distinctly urban film, filled with characters drifting through seemingly aimless lives, living day to day, hand to mouth, where there’s an emphasis on poverty, with people struggling to make end’s meet.  In a city where no one knows anyone else, there’s a bit of an abrupt jolt when the baker’s wife (always dressed in baby pinks or blues) runs into Boni at the shopping mall, his ultimate fantasy, while she’s clearly happy to see a familiar face “from the neighborhood.”  This is prefaced by scenes of Boni on the street as he stares at the baker’s wife through a store window, becoming one of the most tender scenes ever committed to celluloid, a love fantasia to the baker and his wife set to the music of  Tindersticks “Tiny Tears” Tindersticks - Tiny Tears (From the Soundtrack Nenette et Boni)  YouTube (5:54), where the clip is misleading, as the song is only used in the daydream sequence, where natural sound and dialogue follow.  From this reverie, she latches onto him, grasping for a connection in the mad holiday rush of Christmas shopping where they’re literally crushed from the overflowing crowds.  Their conversation couldn’t take on a more bizarre turn, where she nervously rambles on about the mysterious effects of chemicals used in making perfume, where especially the way she describes it makes it sound like a laughable supposition if it weren’t so true, while he can only stare in disbelief, his brain frozen in dream state.  These fantasy interludes are outrageously exaggerated dreams of a perfect marriage, like something depicted in the gloriously artificial universe of musicals, perhaps rising out of the painful void of his own existence, imagining an alternate existence that takes the place of his own.  By the end, reality veers into alternate universe territory, but in this strange and mysterious way, it poetically magnifies the theme of unwanted children, showing a teen mother so traumatized by the unmentioned circumstances surrounding the unnamed father (with hints that it could be her own incestuous father) that she doesn’t even want to look at her own child, while at the same time revealing a young father figure gloriously adoring a child that isn’t even his own, going to great lengths to make it distinctly and decisively an integral part of his life forever.  A tender and touching portrait of damaged lives filled with lingering emotional scars, shot throughout with symbolism, humor, and an intimacy of expression, this is a film doused in a grim reality that seemingly knows no bounds, but is as optimistically uplifting as any fairy tale.     

Small, Beautifully Moving Parts

SMALL, BEAUTIFULLY MOVING PARTS             B-       

USA  (73 mi)  2011 d:  Annie J. Howell and Lisa Robinson       Official site

This is a modest feature and a somewhat unorthodox film, spawned as a pregnancy fantasia expressed in the form of a road movie, where having a baby is partly looking backwards at family recollections and photos, and also a journey ahead into the unknown.  Sarah Sparks (Anna Margaret Hollyman) is a fairly level-headed young woman with a fondness for electronic gadgets and fixing things, where she expresses elation (“Well hello there!”) at the idea of seeing the electrical circuitry inside an old broken down radio picked up for fifty cents.  But when a simple pregnancy stick records that she’s pregnant, she’s instantly befuddled and seems to lose all sense of coherency, suddenly becoming a klutz in every respect.  While her partner Leon (Andre Holland) is totally supportive, both literally jazz-riffing with joy off the ultra sound baby movements, he’s not the part of the puzzle that needs to be put together, instead it’s a missing piece of her life, as her mother abandoned her and her sister without explanation some time ago and has simply disappeared from her life.  Not knowing what to expect, she insists on paying her mother an unexpected visit, which will be part of a combined West Coast Los Angeles visit to see her father and sister.  While her father is completely engrossed with exploring online relationships, he barely has a moment for her except to use her computer repair expertise to fix sudden inexplicable Skype blackouts and intermittent sound loss, where once everything’s back in order, he’s never off the computer.

Sarah’s visit to her sister is a little more involving, as she’s already a mother, though admittedly a poor excuse for one as evidenced by her insistence that her daughter be potty trained in a day, and is part of a community of mothers with kids that are used to getting together and providing collective child care.  Sarah is called upon to fix their laptop computer as well, suffering an unexpected child “accident.”  The tone of the film reaches darkly comic proportions when her sister throws the inevitable baby shower from Hell, where Sarah is literally attacked by a small army of loudly misbehaving children who don’t pay the least bit of attention to their cluelessly inept mothers, which leaves her shell-shocked and a bit traumatized, right alongside the news from her father that her mother doesn’t care to see her, claiming “I Fed-Exed her a postcard and she faxed back.”  Sarah makes a vain attempt to write her an actual letter, but finds this too painstakingly old school and decides to drive into the middle of nowhere in the desert regions of Arizona instead, where word is her mother has “fallen off the grid.”  Maintaining constant phone contact with Leon, who willingly suggests he join her, Sarah insists this is something she needs to do on her own, becoming a metaphor for her physiological pregnancy, which comes complete with side effects, like altered mood swings, unexpected tearfulness, and strange food cravings.  Sarah actually breaks out into a smile when the GPS equipment (actually the voice of the director) in her rented car starts calling her by her name. 

But when electronic things inevitably start breaking down, Leon urges her to visit his sister in Las Vegas, the last place anyone would seemingly seek comfort during a pregnancy.  Nonetheless, Towie (Susan Kelechi Watson) has magical hands in touch with the spiritual world and finds a strangely alluring invisible parallel creature, a lizard with a light bulb for a head, living just outside her skin, giving her a drawing to take with her on her journey.  After a lengthy drive through the Grand Canyon, to the exact same site of an old photograph of her as a baby in her mother’s arms, where Sarah gets downright dour with a traveling family (the director again) that just wants their picture taken, she loses all traces of electronic communication in an apparent dead zone, where somewhere out there among the cactus trees in the dirt roads of the desert are traces of her missing mother.  What she discovers is somewhat eccentric, but very West Coast, as people take their cult worshipping very seriously, where like her father, they are totally engrossed in silent meditating, without an ounce of free time to spare for anybody else.  What seems brazenly selfish is exactly that, yet spun in some mysterious hodgepodge of philosophical selflessness, to be at one with the universe, but lost, apparently to the world around you and everyone in it.  The film is a depository for missed and failed communication, which is certainly a stand-in for all the fears and doubts that suddenly take center stage during pregnancy, especially the closer one comes to full term.  Hollyman, herself, beautifully understates the role with tiny bits of humor throughout, where perhaps the ultimate irony is the circuitry she’s finally called upon to fix is none other than her own, where the title beautifully expresses that slowly developing life form growing inside.  Filled with vague and ambivalent feelings throughout, always expressed through small details, never with a big picture approach, this is as loving and gentle an offbeat portrait of pregnancy and having a baby as you’re going to find.