“Le Chante des Mariees” (“The Wedding Song”), directed by Karin Albou
Two young girls dressed up as brides are playing outside their home in Tunis in the years leading up to the German occupation. One sings to the other a haunting song: “The bride has blackened her eyelashes, made up her lips … hennaed her hair, she has put on her most beautiful dress and all her bracelets … but she is still missing something.”
We don’t find out until the end of French filmmaker Karin Albou’s latest feature film “Le Chante des Mariees” (“The Wedding Song”) — which will be shown as part of the Jerusalem International Film Festival, opening July 9 — what the bride is missing. But the song leaves us with an eerie premonition of the heartbraking scenes to follow in this movie about female intimacy, betrayal and the very personal costs of war.
Set in Tunis on the cusp of World War II, Albou’s second full-length feature zooms in on a sisterly friendship between two adolescent girls — Nour (Olympe Borval), a Muslim, and Myriam (Lizzie Brochere), a Jew — who struggle to maintain their closeness as war unexpectedly disrupts their lives. Nour and Myriam, who have grown up living side by side, share an intimacy that is rarely shown in such explicit terms. They bathe together in the hamam, the communal bath house, caress each other, and sometimes share a bed. The relationship is not sexual, but more physical than Western viewers may be accustomed to, as physical contact often comes in place of words. “In the Orient, body language is very active, and especially when it comes to political issues, they don’t talk,” says Albou from her home in Paris. Highlighting the central tension of the film, she notes: “Myriam knows that if they talk about it [politics], it will be end of their friendship.” Jews and Muslims often found themselves on opposite sides during Germany’s occupation of Tunisia.
We are led to believe that the intimacy between the women stems in part from growing up in a repressive, patriarchal society, where contact between the sexes is often limited and men call the shots. Nour and Myriam, who are 16 and negotiating their fast-approaching adulthood, cling to each other for emotional support. They are excited but scared by the changes that are overcoming them rapidly (sometimes too much so). When Nour kisses her fiancé (and first cousin) for the first time, she rushes to divulge what it felt like to her sisterly comrade. Later on they are each other’s witnesses to their respective defloration scenes. Nour sneaks off to the roof to have sex using the night as cover, as Myriam watches from the side. Myriam undergoes an experience that is equally, if not more, transformative (and disturbing). As per her fiance’s request, Myriam has her pubic hair depilated. Albou purposefully films the moment in real time, making us willing or unwilling witnesses to a moment that is hard to bear. “It was very important to keep the real length of the scene in order that the audience feels the pain for the same pace and for the same length of time as Myriam,” says Albou.
The film’s historical context is Germany’s six-month occupation, in 1942, of Tunisia, the only Arab country to suffer that fate. Albou chose this period after discovering by chance that her grandfather, an Algerian Jew who served as a physician in the French army, had been a POW in Germany. That sparked Albou’s interest in the fate of the Jews of the Maghreb during World War II.
“I thought the Jews from North Africa were protected from all that happened in Europe during that time,” says Albou, who learned the Algerian Jews who had their French citizenship revoked (including her grandmother) were not allowed to work. Initially the Jews in the states that were under France’s patronage hoped to get its protection. But after that country’s 1940 defeat and the extension of Vichy rule to North Africa, the situation of the Jews in Tunisia and Algeria deteriorated. “I chose this (aspect of the) war because nobody knows about it, and because it’s very interesting to talk about the relation between Arabs and Jews,” says Albou. In both Tunisia and Algeria Jews were stripped of their citizenship and forbidden to work in a wide range of jobs. IN November 1942 the Germans took control of Tunisia, established a local Judenrat, took hostages and confiscated the property of the Jews.
Though Tunis was by no means a paradise in the years leading up to the German invasion, clusters of Jews and Muslims lived together peacefully. Such is the case for Nour and Myriam, who grew up in the same courtyard in a poor section of the city. Religion doesn’t seem to come in the way of their friendship, though it does account for differences between the two: Nour is betrothed by her parents to a cousin, and never has the opportunity to attend school, whereas Myriam is educated; and while Nour must cover her head, Myriam is free to walk the streets with her head bare. But the two women share a deep understanding of one another. They look to each other for female solidarity, covering for each other as each tries to find ways around the restrictive society in which they live.
The German invasion changes all that. Fed anti-Semitic propaganda by the Germans, the country’s Muslims become increasingly suspicious of the Jews, and the girls’ friendship becomes strained. Many Muslims support or even collaborate with the Germans, who promise them independence from France, and we are left to wonder how much longer the two women will be able to remain friends.
The invasion also reverses their situations. In order to avoid deportation of herself and her daughter, Myriam’s mother marries her off to a wealthy, older doctor Raoul (Simon Abkarian) who can afford to pay a ransom to the Germans. The marriage crushes Myriam’s hope of finding someone she loves. Nour’s wedding, on the other hand, is delayed because her fiancé, Khaled (Najib Oudghiri), has yet to find a job, a condition her father sets. Khaled eventually finds work with the Germans and turns increasingly radical. In one scene he accompanies a group of German soldiers as they force their way into Myriam’s home and hurt her mother, and later he forbids Nour from all contact with her Jewish friend.
But in Albou’s movie, the war is largely a means of telling a much more personal story. “My first idea was to portray a friendship of two girls, one Jewish, one Muslim, when they are teenagers,” says Albou. “It’s a very special period of life, and the feelings are very unique. Even the most intimate things you share, even defloration.”
She started work on the film 10 years ago, but suspended the project when she failed to raise sufficient funds. But after the success of “La Petite Jerusalem” (“Little Jerusalem,” 2005) — her first feature film, about women living in an Orthodox enclave in the suburbs of Paris, which won the prize for best screenplay at Cannes in 2006 — Albou decided to return to her abandoned script.
Albou found herself not only directing the film, but also starring in one of the main roles. She plays Tita, Myriam’s somewhat unlikable, but distinctly multi-dimensional, mother. Albou unexpectedly took on the role when she couldn’t find an actress to do the part justice, she says.
“I wanted the audience to feel Tita suffered a lot, because she herself was married young to an old man,” says Albou. “In a traditional culture, mothers always transfer what they suffered onto their daughters.”
Today Albou acknowledges that playing Tita had deeper personal resonance. Her Algerian Jewish grandmother dreamed of becoming an actress. Just before World War II, she was hired to play an Egyptian woman in a French movie, but the project was called off due to the war. “All these years, my grandmother still held on to the contract,” says Albou. “I realized afterwards that playing Tita was a way of paying tribute to her, a way to make her alive through the movie.”
This is the third film by Albou to be centered in Tunis, where she lived for a while during her early 20s. One was a documentary and her second short film, the 1999 “Aid el Kebir” is a love story that takes place in Algeria but was shot in Tunisia. “I wanted to live my North African roots, but to live them in Algeria was difficult because of the war,” says Albou, referring to the civil war that raged there through most of the 1990s. “In Tunisia there is a little Jewish community, and I got very linked to that country.”
That’s in part why Albou decided to show Tunisia in a different light, literally. She opted not to film the country in the warm colors we are used to associating with the Orient. Instead, the film is shot, from beginning to end, in a dark shade of blue. “I wanted to shoot Tunisia in the winter, which is very special in North Africa, with its pale white skies, and I decided to recreate that winter ambiance, which is more interesting and less of a cliche.”
Her familiarity with the place made the process of filming this somewhat controversial film easier. “Most of my team was very behind me,” says Albou. But one incident took her by surprise.
After filming one of the final scenes of the movie, which takes place in the basement of a school, Albou learned that 30 to 40 students had gathered upstairs to protest the “film about Jews.” Her crew had seen the protesters, but kept their presence from Albou so she could finish filming the scene in peace. She says she was “in shock” when she learned about the demonstrators.
The “Wedding Song” has not yet been screened in Tunisia, though Albou hopes to show it there. Meanwhile she will be attending the Jerusalem Film Festival together with Borval, the actress who plays Nour. Albou’s plans for the future include a film based on her adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ book “La Douleur” (“The War: A Memoir”), though she is skeptical that the project will come to fruition. “And,” she adds somewhat wistfully, “I would also like to make a movie in Israel.”
