Sunday 8 March 2020

FILM: LIFE AS ENDURANCE FOR 4 NORTH AFRICAN WOMEN

By Dimitri Keramitas

It can be hard sometimes to appreciate a documentary that consists essentially of talking heads, but Visages de la Victoires (The Faces of Victory) presents not so much heads as faces. 

Director Lyèce Boukhitine has selected four North African women (one is his own mother) to tell stories of immigrant life in France over the decades. The women arrived in the 1950s and 1960s and have been in the country ever since. Their faces are lined but fiercely alive, marked by ordeal, pain, and suffering but also resilience.

The poster for the film.
Among other things, Boukhitine aims to pop certain preconceptions we have of the immigrant experience of that time (and perhaps, by inference, nowadays as well). One is that immigrants were all desperate to come to European destinations in the first place. The director’s mother, Cherifa, for instance, never intended to settle in France. Her husband told her they were only going for a short visit – which ended up lasting several decades.

Another assumption is that the conditions they found were paradisiacal compared to the homes they left. Cherifa was used to the well-developed urban environment of Algiers. In France, she found herself in the remote countryside, a no-man’s-land. Her husband didn’t permit her to work, educate herself, or even to go outdoors. She was allowed one activity: having children, more and more children, 14 in all. 

Cherifa is surprisingly forgiving of her late husband, who had been a hard man. She maintains that he’d become so hardened because he’d been removed from his culture and society, his family, and put into a dog-eat-dog environment.

Nevertheless his passing was a liberation for her. Cherifa not only recounts the past but lives her present before our eyes: she’s learns to read and to drive, acquires citizenship, and votes for the first time. She is unemotional about the last milestone, just says it’s a matter of doing her duty. 

A scene from the film. (Photo courtesy of Dean Médias.)
Boukhitine focuses, naturally, on his mother, gingerly and affectionately probing. But he also steps back to show the town where she lives, and the others who accompany her along the new steps in her life. 

In these sequences we’re treated to a positive and human view of a small French town, rather than the usual grim depiction of banlieues. In addition, Cherifa describes how existence in the countrified ghetto wasn’t limited to North Africans but was culturally diverse, with immigrants from other countries as well. 

The director decides to turn to other North African women, not just to fill out his portrait but to ask blunter questions that he couldn’t with his mother. Jimiia, the second woman to be featured, is more idiosyncratic than Cherifa. She’s an observant Muslim who’s covered even when she’s interviewed in her home. At the same time, her head scarf is eye-catching, studded with glittering silver.

Compared with the stolid Earth Mother Cherifa, we imagine that Jimiia turned heads in her day. She’s gone on the haj to Mecca, but that only came after taking another pilgrimage, to Lourdes. It's not clear if she did this out of curiosity or to prepare herself for the other arduous trip. We also see her as she watches videos of Muslim preachers. But when we get to her story she makes no bones about the abuse she suffered at the hands of a male-dominated tradition.

Endurance as "victory". (Photo courtesy of Dean Médias.) 
Like Cherifa, Jimiia was forced into marriage with an older man, in her case one who was already married. Her husband, whom she found repugnant from the beginning, raped and beat her. She took the radical step of divorce and, unlike Cherifa, who was coerced into immigrating, Jimiia remained in France as a domestic-abuse refugee, before that situation knew a name.  

The third woman, Mimouna, presents a meek, gentle face and appears initially to have a more “traditional” outlook. She speaks with an occasional high-pitched emphasis and wears a headscarf in an unassuming way. She hasn’t suffered the male depredations of the previous women, one reason being that she anticipated them from an early age. 

She agreed to her teenage arranged marriage - but told her future husband that if he ever laid a hand on her she’d kill him. He never did. Her husband seems to have been a decent man, though we can never know if he was that way from the start or appreciated a strong woman. She was Algerian, he was Moroccan. She agreed to a rugged road-trip so that their children could discover the land of their forebears.

A victory: voting. (Photo courtesy of Dean Médias.) 
But when her husband had the chance to construct a home in his country, she gave him an ultimatum: me or Morocco. There were two countries of origin, which had been at odds over territory in the Western Sahara. The couple needed a land of compromise, and France was that county. The husband chose his wife, and France. The irony here is that the eventual death of the husband, instead of being a liberating relief, was genuinely tragic.

The last of the quartet of women is Aziza, the most Westernized. Her hair is well-coiffed, she dresses smartly, and she speaks French impeccably. She comes across as learned and intellectually sophisticated. The thought many viewers may find themselves having is that it’s particularly sad for such a woman to suffer the ignominies of patriarchal structures. But while Aziza’s suffering is the most articulately delineated, it is not necessarily more felt than the other three, or by any number of poor, less educated immigrant women. The director confronts us with the realization that everyone has the right to human dignity. 

Recounting survival. (Photo courtesy of Dean Médias.)
Aziza started working late in life, in social services - only after being widowed. Her being employed was unthinkable during her husband’s lifetime. We follow on a guided tour of her past impoverishment. She describes how her husband obtained what amounted to a shack, which was unheated and without sanitary facilities. Although the public housing called HLM is now seen as drab and oppressive, at that time it was a godsend. We see period photos of what look like shantytowns or favelas and understand why. Aziza’s self-control describing her long Calvary can be maddening, but we recognize this tone for what it is: a distancing survival mechanism for a victim and a way to maintain moral authenticity as a witness.

Although the director’s reason for interviewing women other than his mother was to permit himself more liberty in his questioning, he actually becomes more self-effacing. There’s less emotional investment, which is only natural. We don’t really want his story to displace that of the women, and his decency and discretion are palpable.

It’s discomfiting for a male viewer to realize that the “victory” of the title comes to a great extent from the women’s longevity in relation to their husbands - that they outlived them. One might reason that the men did it to themselves, being the hard-working, hard-living sort. But ultimately it was the system that used them as economic cannon fodder, treated their women (and children) as collateral damage, and then spit them into an early grave.

The women also see victory in the younger generations of their families. We see the grand-daughters, modern young women for whom the conditions depicted in the film are as alien as the Jurassic Age. It’s heart-warming, yet we know there are other young women whose lives are not as rosy.

Obscurantist tradition still exists, and brutal economics and dehumanizing technology and culture seem ready to pick up the slack. The real message of the film seems to be one of endurance rather than victory. Either way, the harrowing journeys are always absorbing, and the faces that recount them have a special beauty. We can characterize Les Visages de la Victoire as Mother Courage x 4, except that there are many, many more than just these four women. 

Distribution: Dean Médias

Les Visages de la Victoire opens in French cinemas this week.