‘Aicha’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Mehdi M. Barsaoui. Tunisia/France/Italy /Saudi Arabia/Qatar. 2024. 123 minutes.

What would you do if you got the chance for one more life, a clear slate – particularly if your individual was downtrodden, cleansing bogs with little prospects for the rest in arid Tozeur on the sting of Tunisia’s Sahara? Mehdi M. Barsaoui returns after the success of 2019’s Cesar-winning A Son with Aicha, a fantasy/melodrama and girl’s movie a few lower-class lodge employee who grabs that likelihood with each fingers and heads for the brilliant lights huge metropolis of Tunis.

Audiences at dwelling and within the area will take pleasure in all the chances Barsoui provides his main woman

Enjoying in Venice’s Horizons part, Aicha contains a magnetic efficiency from newcomer Fatma Sfar as Aya/Amira/Aicha in a drama-drenched movie which additionally takes in police and authorities corruption in a post-revolution Tunis. Undoubtedly set for fulfillment in Center-Jap markets, the place it would courtroom a youthful viewers with comparable desires of liberation, it could be too blunt for arthouse markets elsewhere, though Barsaoui reveals himself greater than adept at directing unexpectedly tense motion sequences. The actual fact it was impressed – in small half – by a real story will assist draw consideration.

The principle problem with Aicha is that there are not less than three, if not 4, tales right here, all heightened melodrama, and Barsaoui melds them collectively in a straight-up dramatic through-narrative centered on Aya (Sfar), her face in tight close-up as she morphs.  There are distinctly totally different taking pictures types on show right here too, from the crisp interiors of a resort lodge in Tozeur to the arid and majestic panorama there and on to Tunis, with its electrical colors, sounds, and fixed, whirling motion.  Barsaoui units himself and his technical workforce a problem – they ship,  however a two-hour working time is an excessive amount of for the format, and the framework of the movie can’t all the time help it.

He begins with Aya, an unschooled chambermaid who has been paying off her mother and father’ money owed for the reason that age of 14. Each day she takes the minibus to the worldwide lodge in Tozeur, the place friends feast on what appear like bionic prawns, earlier than returning dwelling to assist her mom put together meals for takeaway supply. Now her mother and father need her to marry an older divorcee, simply as the fun of her four-year liaison with the lodge’s married supervisor is starting to look like a one-way road of disgrace.

So Aya is unquestionably in a bind when, sooner or later, the mini-bus she is travelling in dramatically plunges off a cliff in a tightly-shot and -edited sequence and he or she is taken for useless (this occurred in actual life in Tunisia, though the scenario solely lasted for a couple of days). Aya jumps on the alternative unexpectedly afforded to her. She robs her lover blind, dons a burqa to look at her personal funeral and heads for Tunis with none identification, however with the prospect of a brand new life and all its potentialities.

Issues are clearly going to be tough for Aya, now calling herself Amira, in Tunis with no buddies and no papers, however the movie takes an enormous soar to plunge her right into a lurid net of crime and police corruption. In brief order, she finds a flatmate, begins consuming vodka and going to golf equipment – the burqa is swiftly changed by mini-skirts and midriffs – and turns into concerned in a police cover-up surrounding a homicide. The investigating police officer (Nidhal Saadi) then will get his personal again story, probably on account of him being a giant native star, and Amira is robbed and raped, then befriended by a saintly single-mother bakery proprietor referred to as Hela (Hela Ayed). It’s loads to tackle board, particularly for a naive 28 year-old.

“This nation has no mercy,” Amira is warned, “particularly for a lady such as you.” It’s very tough to pin down precisely what ‘sort’ of ladies Aya/Amira is, although, as Barsaoui adjustments her so usually. In some ways, that’s factor, and there’s little doubt that audiences at dwelling and within the area will take pleasure in all the chances he provides his main woman, which they will solely dream of themselves – though too usually for a liberated single girl in Tunis, it’s additionally the stuff of nightmares.