Cameleon Actress, Franco-Iranian Dissident Golshifteh Farahani takes the lead in Roqya. Nour raised – almost – only his son after separation with his violent spouse. To make ends meet, the well tempered mother was able to develop a business of smuggling exotic animals in order to satisfy the healers of the neighborhood. Film at the crossroads of genres, this first feature film by Said Belktibia combines records with palpable tension and constant stress. Roqya explores the monoparentality and power of images, between incisive humour and cavalry film not so far from the real...
Criticism of Roqya
People's opium
We know how much expression « City films » There are as many clichés on the suburb as on the infamant side, as if the authors had to be partitioned according to their social origin or that a target audience had to be defined. We were already discussing this with Sebastien Vaniček, director of popular success Vermins, also present at Gérardmer this year. Said Belktibia is also a young director who will certainly have to follow in the future. It was formed by the collective Kurtajmé which promotes equality of opportunity and access to film professions since its foundation by Kim Chapiron, Toumani Sangaré and Romain Gavras. It can be said that a rather punk mind gravitates around the association.
If one paints such a portrait of Said Belktibia, it is that one feels a different fiber in the writing of his characters. By poaching the goal on Nour and his son Amine, the director succeeds from the beginning of the game in making this relationship a touching mother son and this without ever turning to slander or miserabilism. Nour is a mother who's in trouble and, logically, her son too. This family cocoon, woven into a single parent cell, all those who have lived know that it has something cabossed but deeply human in its heart.
From beginning to end, Nour is never reduced to the fate of a victim. Deprived or rather saved from a family chapter where the couple too often standard social relations and education around paternal authority, broken families still have atypical shells and children necessarily more sensitive to the hazards of adults. It is a logic of survival that crosses these families reduced in the same way as the ordeal that awaits Nour and his son.
Amine is thus catapulted in her mother's nickel-plated foot combinations. Said Belktibia wanted to address the theme of Roqya, this ritual medicine at the edge of witchcraft and exorcism. During our exchange (and for his very first interview above) he seemed more measured to denounce it, at least to regard it as an act of charlatans. We'll regret that we didn't have enough time to dig this up. It is therefore on this perpetual ridge line that the characters walk like funambules, all the more so since everything is presented as if Nour made himself an accomplice of crooks. There is no ambiguity on this point.
There is, however, one side of Peter and the Wolf that we find in this first film. First of all, his son was born about the benefits of Roqya, when a part of himself knew very well that his mother did not believe in her cornets for a moment when she launched herself into a mobile application. Punctuated with well-feeling humor, Roqya But it's not a comedy. Not at all. It's more a thriller with sarcastic projections but that takes the guts! When the film turns towards a track without respite following a tragic incident involving Nour, you stay scotched at the seat, caught by hints of reality.
A cynical echo of the present
It's that there's something credible about this witch hunt that starts on the quarter turn. As we watched the film, a part of France also let itself embark on a crude cabal following the murder of young Thomas, stabbed at a ball in Crepol. As often with tragedies and various facts, the far right (carried by complicit media) was seized to conduct its punitive expeditions and raconades at low cost.
These « hero » avengers alleged that they « Would do justice » as the oxymoric expression wants that never calls the follower. Whatever if no one knew the motives of the authors, it doesn't matter if the prosecutor had quickly rejected the myth of a supposed « anti-white racism »It was that we needed a culprit first and lead the pack. Seductive rhetoric of Punisher, or gullible trap in bad values, in the image of the Roqya which materializes neuroses by the treated bodies. We find the same kind of trigger that dynamizes all the rules of a social order, in reality both precarious and artificial.
The rage of living
With the same icy mechanics and a perspective specific to the microcosm of the suburbs, one thus finds powerless to a profound injustice that turns into an attempt to lynch Nour by his own neighbours. Knowledge or anonymity gathered by a single common denominator: social networks and a society of permanent commentary. This is how we see ourselves. facecam all types of hypocritical profiles, wishing to draw the (mediatic) coverage and also to be part of the event. To be there is to exist; paradox of facade empathy, the ambivalence of networks taught us to « suffering with » and sometimes leave our critical mind in the closet, while emotion always precedes reason. Saturate people with sensitive stimuli to forget as quickly as possible the determinants of crises by the eternal mechanics of modern Arabic phone.
It is by slipping irremediably towards the precipice that the big mouth and the crazy humor of Nour are gradually melting, even if they never completely faint. Golshifteh Farahani is always looking for breath before tipping to cold revenge, derived from « rape and revenge » dear to cathartic horror cinema. Destabilising for many of the spectators who thought they were in known terrain, Roqya is not really a film about exorcism, except that it is to extract from the bodies the darkness of Man.
It's a poignant film that throws a nose to the real. Amine calls Amine in the real life and fight of Nour, badly molested in public in general indifference during one of the icy scenes of Roqya, recalls the optimism and determination of Golshifteh Farahani in his fight for the freedom of his own. An enraged optimism that shows each of his words on its history and that of the Iranian people suffering. In watermark, it is also a film about violence against women. In reality, too, social networks can be double-edged as the sadly demonstrated repression of the movement Female, Life, Freedom. Roqya shows vitalism inversely proportional to the misery of men. And despite some awkwardness in his epilogue or his screenplay effects, sometimes a bit easy, this first film by Said Belktibia largely deserves your support for his release this Wednesday.
While we are talking about « belief » in the broad sense, this social drama with the rarely addressed theme is shaken by an ordinary witchcraft (our words necessarily having an impact on the person who receives them) forcing his graqi (or rather his charlatane interpreted by a Golshifteh Farahani « Owned ») to stop the practice of self-medication to save his own flesh. And taking unexpected detours in order to build a evil intimately related to the complexity of human nature, it is by consulting his primitive instinct that he finds his salvation. Educate yourself so that you do not blindly believe in something that imposes on your eyes!