'The Wedding Song' probes special bond between 2 women

BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

Two teenage girls — one Muslim, one Jewish — are best friends in 1942 Tunis when the Germans take over the French colony of Tunisia. France has capitulated to the Nazis by this time, and the collaborationist Vichy government is in control. Myriam lives with her widowed mother in one apartment and Nour lives with her large family next door. When the French film "The Wedding Song" opens, Nour is daydreaming about her engagement to her handsome cousin Khaled, and Myriam has just been kicked out of school for speaking too forthrightly about the restrictions placed on Tunisian Jews.

Not much is popularly known about the impact of the Nazi racial policies in North Africa, at least in comparison to the Holocaust in Europe. According to the film, the Germans took advantage of the existing resentment of the French and the Jews, who seem to have been conflated in the minds of Arab Tunisians. Limitations and extortion quickly came into play, and Jewish men were hauled off to forced-labor camps. Anti-Semitic propaganda exploited existing class conflict to further divide Arabs and Jews. Director Karin Albou's parents come from Tunisia, and her first feature "Le Petite Jerusalem" examined the relationship between Jews and Muslims living in Paris.

Fired from her job as a seamstress, Myriam's mother, played by Albou, arranges a marriage for her daughter to a much older wealthy doctor, Raoul. Unlike her girlfriend Nour, Myriam has no desire to marry, particularly Raoul, and makes her distaste obvious. Raoul persists in his courtship, however, to Myriam‘s mother‘s relief and the girl‘s fury. Nour's plans to marry, on the other hand, stall when her fiance cannot find work. Her father refuses to let the wedding take place until he's employed. The girls commiserate with each other about their romantic difficulties, and Albou has the opportunity to show us aspects of Tunisian life.

Albou knows North African culture well, and the film captures the charming sensuality of a society that separates men and women, but doesn't ignore the pleasures of both. Music, food, earthy humor and ritual pervade the characters' lives, and while many customs oppress women and keep them subjugated, people don‘t define themselves that way. This is the culture they know and accept. Albou focuses on the world that Tunisian women have created for themselves — a world where they can dance, sing, joke, sit around a bathhouse together, far from the judging eyes of men. Her camera is so enamored of this feminine world, and particularly of the bodies of her two young stars, that it often feels lascivious in its greedy gaze. It's not just that there's plenty of nudity in the film, but that the women's bodies are studied and examined in a way that's almost fetishistic. One has the urge to turn away.

Olympe Borval as Nour and Lizzi Brochere as Myriam do well enough in the starring roles, which consist mostly of staring moodily at each other. Although each is involved with a man, and at least one of them seems to desire her betrothed, their passion is primarily for each other. The director is coy about the nature of this relationship, whether it's a form of female adolescent friendship or something more, and that coyness contributes to the film's preposterous resolution. An interesting and respectful look at a little-known culture and historical period, this film misses as a character study. It's showing at the Quad Cinema in New York.