This year’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition features three films all about characters on spiritual, physical, and sexual journeys toward new versions of themselves. Nadia Fall’s “Brides” follows two girls as they travel from the U.K. to Syria in order to join an extremist group they think will offer them freedom from religious persecution and a sense of shared community. In Amel Guellaty’s “Where The Wind Comes From,” two wayward youths hope an art competition will offer them a life raft in post-revolution Tunisia. Lastly, director Chloé Robichaud and screenwriter Catherine Léger’s “Two Women” traces the sexual liberation of two unfulfilled women living in suburban Montréal.
In 2015 a group of girls from East London left school, traveling covertly to Turkey to join the so-called “jihadi, girl-power subculture” of the Islamic State known as the Brides of ISIL, along with an estimated 550 other women and girls who made the same journey from other Western countries. Director Nadia Fall was moved by the story of these girls, dubbed by the U.K. press as Bethnal Green trio, and felt the media dismissed them as simply terrorists without even trying to understand why they made such a drastic choice. Her film “Brides,” written by Suhayla El-Bushra, is a fictionalized attempt to explore their motivations and emotional states.
The film centers on Doe (Ebada Hassan), who immigrated to the U.K. from Somalia as a child with her parents, and her best friend, the brash Muna (Safiyya Ingar), who has spent her life being derogatorily called a “Paki” by her fellow students. Doe is the quieter of the two girls, spending most of her time in her head or observing her surroundings. She is a practicing Muslim, while her mother (Yusra Warsama) has embraced a loser lifestyle (and is unfortunately partnered with an abusive man). Tired of non-stop microaggressions from other students and adults alike, Muna confronts racists head-on. When she gets in trouble for defending herself, she gets further abused at home by her father.
As they make their journey from their small rural hometown in the U.K. to Turkey and finally the Syrian border, the girls meet different types of Muslim identities, which gives them both the broader sense of community they’ve been searching for, but also pushes them to question their increasingly extremist beliefs. Throughout the film, El-Bushra’s script flashes back to scenes of emotional importance for Doe, sometimes with Muna, sometimes with her mother. The emphasis on only Doe’s interiority creates an imbalance between the presentation of the two girls, especially when Ingar’s big performance could use some grounding in character development. Fall renders these interludes inside Doe’s head in muddled flashes that might be close to how memory actually works, but mostly leaves the viewer disoriented and confused. Although the filmmakers succeed in humanizing these girls, slightly less fussy editing would have given the film’s weighty themes more room to breathe.
Writer-director Amel Guellaty’s “Where The Wind Comes From” also follows two young people on a journey towards what they hope will be a better life. Neighbors since their youth, 19-year-old Alyssa (Eya Bellagha) and 23-year-old Mehdi (Slim Baccar), feel lost and hopeless in their dead-end neighborhood in post-revolution Tunis. Mehdi can’t find work, and Alyssa doesn’t see the point in studying for her college acceptance exams. “You’re just dreamers,” she’s told by an elder. “If we can’t dream,” she replies, “what is left for us?”
One day, Alyssa sees a poster for an art contest in Djerba that could be a path toward immigrating to Germany and convinces Mehdi to enter. “I look sad,” she tells Mehdi after he’s drawn a surrealist portrait of her for the contest. “Borrowing” a car from a local hood, the two hit the road, learning about each other and their country as they make their way towards Djerba. Here, the film hits the kind of road trip tropes—lack of money, car trouble, side trips, fights—that you expect from the genre. Yet, like the best of these films, Guellaty’s script finds the internal wisdom that the road can help unlock in ourselves.
However, for every nugget of wisdom, insightful cultural or political critique, or fanciful flight of whimsy (Alyssa’s daydreams are often accompanied by otherworldly animation), instead of giving character and world-building moments a beat, Guellaty speeds past them with multiple travel montages and obtrusive needle drops that hamper any sense of transcendence. A similarly rushed ending could have used a few more beats to let us sit with these characters a little longer with their new sense of self after their transformative tip.
Ostensibly about two modern women—Violette (Laurence Leboeuf) and Florence (Karine Gonthier-Hyndman) on the verge of a nervous breakdown, there is a third major character in director Chloé Robichaud and screenwriter Catherine Léger’s “Two Women,” which has been adapted from Claude Fournier’s 1970 sex comedy “Two Women in Gold.” That is the eco-friendly condominium in suburban Montréal in which they dwell. The two women are neighbors in the sprawling complex, though the two have rarely spoken prior to the film’s events. We meet them one wintry evening, as each gazes out their windows yearning for something…else. Robichaud uses her extra-widescreen frame to zoom out on the building so each of the women looks minuscule against the larger wooden structure, just tiny little details in its complex world.
The two meet one day when Violette, who finds maternity leave to be a suffocating bore, invites Florence, whose battle with depression dominates her life, over for a cup of coffee one morning. When Violette asks about what she thinks are loud sex noises coming from Florence’s side of their shared walls, she is taken aback. Florence admits she and her partner David (Mani Soleymanlou) haven’t had sex in years. A bond is then formed as these two women actively seek to change the things that make them unhappy. Florence goes off her antidepressants to get in touch with her sexuality with unpredictable results, while Violette finally allows her child to go to daycare and finds fulfillment in nonmonogamy.
As we follow them through a series of handyman hookups, marital and parental strife, and bizarro condo meetings, we also get to know the people who make up the community around them, like the younger neighbor (Sophie Nélisse) who has a crush on David, the co-worker (Juliette Gariépy) sleeping with Violette’s husband Benoit (Félix Moati), or the hot to go exterminator (Maxime Le Flaguais) who can’t get enough of Violette. Léger’s script is at its sharpest when it spins them all into a sexual comedy of manners peppered with the region’s signature off-kilter humor but fumbles a bit when it tries to examine modern feminism through the lens of contemporary sexual mores. Despite a few missteps, the two women behind “Two Women” have overall crafted a frothy, sexy, thoroughly hilarious comedy about that eternal seven-year itch.
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