SFJFF 29: The Wedding Song

In The Wedding Song Karin Albou casts a lingering, sensual eye on the Sephardic roots she glossed in her first feature, La Petite Jerusalem. Her second film is a story of friendship between two teenaged girls whose families live side by side in Tunis during World War II. Nour is Moslem and Myriam Jewish, but they inhabit a harmonized cultural landscape where Jews and Moslems move through one another's lives with ease, sharing space in the hammam, in the market, at the wells and in the courtyards of their crumbling but still beautiful dwellings. The rituals of domestic life are lovingly filmed and saturated with authentic color and detail; there is a pronounced emphasis on the feminine, including frank exploration of budding sexuality and of ordinary physical intimacy, but the film ultimately fails to deliver much more than a loose collection of stereotypes, as each character proceeds to conform to the simplified cultural paradigms we are already familiar with. Myriam is educated, Nour is illiterate and credulous, her fiance Khaled is a narrow-minded Islamist whose head is filled with unsophisticated bigotries; both girls are fabulously innocent, completely subject to the wills of their parents and (soon enough) their husbands. No doubt there are truths to be found in these conventional forms, but the story which is their logical outcome is too predictable and even sentimental, which is a pity for a film that is in other respects quite bold.

Briefly stated, the story hinges on the fissure that opens in the girls' idealized relationship when the Nazis enter Tunis in 1942 and foment racial hatred there. There are flickers of the complex historical situation which precedes this period, the legacy of French colonial rule in North Africa and the ways in which it impacted Jews and Arabs differently, but such themes are quickly dropped. The seismic world events which are the story's immediate context are so dimly imagined it is as if they are cardboard fixtures at the back of the stage in what feels like the school play. The overall impression is of a culturally sensitive but politically unsophisticated thinker at work, whose sensibilities and talents would be better showcased in less dramatic and - for world history - less critical contexts.

The treatment of Islam is more nuanced, and falls in with Albou's general observations about Moslem-Jewish co-operation; it is Nour's encounter with one of the many pro-Judaic verses in the Qu'ran which prompts her final reconciliation with her friend. But such an ending can really only satisfy the sentimentalists among us. When Albou wakes up to some of life's more intriguing complexities, and does not look to cataclysmic world events to provide her dramatic openings, but trusts in her aesthetics, she could make something really interesting.