THE SEASON OF MEN
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Cowboy Booking International Director: Moufida Tlatli Writer: Moufida Tlatli Cast: Rabiaa Ben Abdallah, Sabah Bouzouita, Ghalia Ben Ali, Hend Sabri, Ezzedine Gennoun, Mouna Noureddine, Azza Baariz, Lilia Falkat, Adel Hergal Screened at: The Screening Room, NYC 9/30/01
Photographer Chedli Chaouachi spares little effort to make the complicated and often heartbreaking film, "The Season of Men," into a travelogue. There is nothing here to coax Westerners, already wary of traveling to Tunisia, to any of its tourist locations, particularly Djerba--which resembles nothing more than a barren location whose people have nothing to do but weave carpets. In one brief scene, a blonde tourist, presumably from France (which afford the small North African country the lion's share of tourist income), is gyrating in a discotheque, but otherwise we see little of the capital city of Tunis or the sun-drenched island of Djerba to the south of the country. Moufida Tlatli, who wrote and directed the family-centered story, has more important items on his agenda in a story that will strike us in the non-Islamic nations of the world with one well-represented theme: that of family dysfunction. Added to the usual conflicts that break out among its women, also including the unhappy men is the clash between traditional Islamic ways and the modern culture.
If this film had centered in modern-day Afghanistan, no such conflict would have existed, given the complete repression which the Taliban-governed country has imposed on its people. But in Tunisia, which second to Turkey comes across as already one of the most liberated states in the Muslim world, the struggle between young women who crave a freer way of life and their patriarchs (and older matriarchs) who rule over them is hardly subtle.
Flashing back and forth between the current year and the life of a family circle ten and fifteen years ago, Tlatli's film observes two generations in the same family who are at odds with each other and in at least one dramatic case with itself. Aicha (Rabiaa Ben Abdallah) is shows a decade earlier weaving carpets on the island of Djerba for sale by her husband, Said (Ezzedine Gennoun), in Tunis. Like most of the women in the family, Aicha is living apart from her husband, who visits only once a year at which time the females, alternately brooding and laughing in their daily companionship with one another desperately hope to become pregnant. Aicha has a young son, Aziz (Adel Hergal), whom only a mother could love: he is autistic, mute and difficult to manage. Aicha's problems are compounded by her tyrannical mother-in- law, who does want the island home to be reduced to a workshop, and pushes her power to the limit in demanding that Aicha's young daughter, Emna (Lilia Falket), remain home instead of going to school.
The plight of the women is seen in the present time as the grown Emna ( Hend Sabri), a professional violinist, is in love with the conductor (who refuses to divorce his wife) and appears misogamistic, given the dead marriages of the women she has known for a decade or more. Other suffering women including Aicha's sexually-frustrated friend Zeineb (Sabah Bouzoutia), whose husband left her for good and is living in France and who suffers from psychomatic pain throughout her body, and Emna's sister Meriem (Ghalia Ben Ali), who as a child was almost raped and now refuses to consummate her six-months'-old marriage to a man who is losing patience.
"The Season of Men" relates to the one month of the year that the men who are working in Tunis visit their wives but could describe as well the permanent condition of the male gender in the conservative Islamic world. The story is moving, its principal drawback being the confusing ways that Tlatli shifts back and forth in time.
Not Rated. Running time: 122 minutes. (C) 2001 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
========== X-RAMR-ID: 29646 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 252230 X-RT-TitleID: 1110661 X-RT-SourceID: 570 X-RT-AuthorID: 1123
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews