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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Endurance as "victory". (Photo courtesy of Dean Médias.) |
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
