Posted at 1:00 p.m.
Launched last year at the Cannes Film Festival as part of Critics’ Week, then awarded at the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival, where it won the prizes for best film and best actor, A story of love and desire lives up to the fine reputation that preceded its release in Quebec.
This second feature film by Leyla Bouzid (I barely open my eyes), a Tunisian filmmaker who, like the heroine of her feature film, studied in France, is in a class of her own, thanks to a simple question of perspective. By diverting the clichés usually linked to learning stories, the director, who also signs her screenplay, offers the portrait of a young man in the midst of a sentimental education, from an angle rarely seen in cinema.
In doing so, she illustrates, without any didacticism, the richness of a secular literary culture, which expresses the things of love and sex by going well against the image sometimes associated with the Arab world in the West. There also lies the strength of the film.
In addition to her frank intention to eroticize the male body, with delicacy and subtlety, Leyla Bouzid leads us into a story where a woman from the Maghreb turns out to be more free-spirited than the young man in love with her. Even if the latter was born in France and has never set foot in Algeria, the country where his parents are from, we feel that the weight of a certain cultural tradition weighs on him, stemming from the suburb of Paris where he grew up.
Sami Outalbali, already noticed in the series Sex Education, displays the assurance of a young man in love with a few certainties, while expressing a real inner vulnerability. Facing him, Zbeida Belhajamor, who is making her screen debut here, is luminous. They are both gorgeous.
A story of love and desire is currently showing.
Drama
A story of love and desire
Leyla Bouzid
With Sami Outalbali, Zbeida Belhajamor, Diong-Keba Tacu
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