After six months of waiting due to the closing of cinemas in January, the film A story of love and desire is finally coming out with us, he who closed Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2021. And believe us, this second feature film by Leyla Bouzid, after I barely open my eyes, will thrill Quebecers’ skins. The director and screenwriter makes us taste the eroticism of words as one greedily bites into the forbidden fruit before languidly delighting in its sweet flesh. Poetry has rarely reached such a degree of sensuality in cinema. We almost come close to the sin of the flesh.
“Indulge in the antics of the beauties with erect breasts and, like wandering gazelles, abandon yourself to enjoyment. In this lush garden, to the howling wolf there responds a joyous song of birds. Here is love and desire as described to us by the Arab poet Ibn’Arabî in the 13th century.e century. A sense of refined pleasure that the young Ahmed is about to study, who is beginning his studies in literature at the Sorbonne University in Paris. This young man from the Algerian immigrant community did not suspect that his culture contained such sensuality. Just as he did not suspect that the beautiful Farah, a Tunisian student, would awaken in him all the flowers of Arab erotic poetry.
As Leyla Bouzid told us in an interview last week, she was greatly inspired by The piano lesson of Jane Campion to eroticize the bodies of her characters. But there is also Almodóvar in Bouzid’s way of filming bodies, as the great Spanish master was able to do in In the flesh. The Tunisian director multiplies the close-ups with flush light that lingers on both male and female leather, almost making the texture of the skin feel under the fingers. She sensualizes her characters without sexualizing them, as if she kept a certain modesty in order to present a complete desirable being, and not simply a body object of desire.
And as if human beings weren’t enough, Bouzid even goes so far as to eroticize books. Through his lens, the pages of books are so many pieces of skin that the protagonists caress, the grain of the paper merging with that of the epidermis. We not only savor the words of the poets that we hear, but also those that we see, and all our senses are on the lookout.
However, this ode to sensuality would not have all its glory without the music of composer Lucas Gaudin, still little known in the 7e art. The soundtrack occupies an important place in the films of Leyla Bouzid, because it speaks where the words fail the characters. Gaudin’s incredible score, a hybrid between contemporary and jazz, suggests the brushing of bodies as much as the heart racing with excitement, and raising the temperature. Feverish and sublime, we would have liked more.
Between fantasy and reality
Sami Outalbali thrills the viewer to the rhythm of Ahmed’s erotic awakening with great sensitivity and restraint. The Académie des César also nominated him for the prize for best male hope last February. A talent to follow, therefore.
In Ahmed’s eyes shimmers an ocean of worms, each foot of which rhymes with Farah. He is a poet who seeks his voice, because this one does not assume his desire however irrepressible. He feels prisoner of a cultural straitjacket, while it is himself who imposes these barriers, as much for fear of the gaze of others as for fear that reality does not live up to the fantasy.
Pillar of social criticism, Ahmed allows its creator to remind us that men also need to emancipate themselves. Rich in social discourse, A story of love and desire does not evade the question of the place of women and also touches on the problem of the image of the Arab community. The one she sends back to herself and the one she sends back to others. Dense subjects dear to the director, evoked with accuracy, and which call for their own work.
From film to film, Leyla Bouzid refines her style. The next promises a brilliant moment of cinema.