You probably don’t know her name yet: Leyla Bouzid. But, believe us, she is already one of the filmmakers to follow. His first feature film was able to attract attention. I barely open my eyes, released in 2015, won the Audience Award at the Venice Film Festival and the Lumière Award for Best Francophone Film. With her second feature film, she strikes again: she closes Critics’ Week 2021 in Cannes and wins the Best Film Prize at the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival. This new nugget is called A story of love and desire. The Tunisian director thus offers our enamored eyes a sensuality on the verge of igniting the film.
Ahmed is a child of the Parisian estates, from immigration. His parents came to France from Algeria in the hope of finding a better life there. And at 18, Ahmed made them proud by joining the Sorbonne, where he decided to study Arabic poetry. There he met Farah, a Tunisian who had come to study in Paris. The young man immediately falls under her spell. At the same time as he is going to discover an erotic literature of which he did not suspect the existence, Ahmed, overwhelmed by his love for Farah, is going to fight against the desire that this one inspires in him.
Telling a male trajectory
“When you are a director, you have the impression that it goes without saying that you are telling women’s stories, Leyla Bouzid is indignant. There is a kind of simplification, as if a woman could only tell a female trajectory, which is absurd. […] There, I just wanted to watch, to film a young man who is experiencing his first emotions, and accept the fact that I don’t know him completely, accept his share of mystery that escapes me. »
When you are a director, you have the impression that it goes without saying that you tell women’s stories. There is a kind of simplification, as if a woman could only tell a female trajectory, which is absurd. […] There, I just wanted to watch, to film a young man who is experiencing his first emotions, and accept the fact that I don’t know him completely, accept his share of mystery that escapes me.
Writing the character of Ahmed presented a big challenge for Bouzid. Not because he’s a man, but because it’s an interior portrait, where Ahmed’s only opponent to his desire for Farah is himself. “We are all in shackles, we all have to free ourselves from something, says the director. Often, for women, it’s more visible, more outward. Men also have an emancipation trajectory to do, but it’s more interior, because there’s a whole battle waged to try to correspond to an image that is very confining. »
Eroticize the man
When we think of sensuality in cinema, of the multitude of precedents that almost serve as a rule, we think of women. We think of Rita Hayworth languidly removing her gloves in Ritato Brigitte Bardot naked revealing her buttocks in Contempt. We could go on like this for a long time. Until we come across the camera of Leyla Bouzid, who is just as interested, with A story of love and desireto masculine sensuality.
“With the director of photography, we looked a lot for a slightly erotic scenography […]. I thought a lot about The piano lesson from Jane Campion, to paintings by Shiele, recalls the director. Right from the start, it was a matter of eroticizing the male body and imbuing the whole film with sensuality. […] It had to be worked in all the materials, with the colors, to be close to the body. It was really central to the aesthetic of the film. »
The strength of the Arab woman
At the heart of the film, there is also the woman. In I barely open my eyes, Leyla Bouzid made us discover Tunisian youth before the revolution, with the energy suppressed by the State and society, through the character of Farah. A first name meaning “joy” in Arabic and which she once again decked out her heroine in A story of love and desire. “Writing the screenplay forA story of love and desire, I was focused on the male character, and when I imagined the female character, Farah kind of imposed herself on me again. They [les deux Farah] seemed to me to have the same characteristics, to be the same character. So, somewhat naturally, I continued the existence of this character, for whom I found it interesting that he met Ahmed. »
These two Farah allow the director to consider the place of women in Arab society. “It’s about saying that there are a lot of strong women in the Arab world, because they take charge of a lot of things, because they have to impose themselves to exist. So what I show are very strong women, who even drive their desires, their destiny. These are characters that interest me a lot and that I wanted, in A story…, confronting men who find it difficult to take charge of their desire. I also wanted to offer portraits of men who have the right to be fragile, who doubt, hesitate. I wanted to show a new masculinity. […] Masculinity among Arab men is often perceived as a very exacerbated form of virility, so I wanted to offer something else. »
A story of love and desire hits theaters June 17.