“The Little Last” by Hafsia Herzi offers a lift to the Cannes Film Festival | EUROtoday
Get real time updates directly on you device, subscribe now.
CErtes it’s a little early, on the third day of the Cannes competitors, to enterprise to a prediction … But too unhealthy, we dare to say it within the enthusiasm following the official projection room gentle: the third function movie by Hafsia Herzi, The little final (second French movie within the competitors after File 137 by Dominik Moll), a transferring movie, robust, and of nice braveness, ought to logically meet on the observe document, if solely with an interpretation value for the very younger Nadia Melliti.
A newbie referred to as to an awesome future, a powerful presence of cinema – a closed face and loud look in a scene, radiant and tender smile in one other – like a 2025 little sister on the Sandrine Bonnaire de To our loves (1981).
Archety
Discovered the 12 months of its 20 years in The seed and the mule (2007), César this 12 months for BorgoHafsia Herzi has chosen to adapt The youngest, An autobiographical novel by Fatima Daas. She subsequently attaches to the footsteps of a heroine named additionally Fatima (Nadia Melliti subsequently).
At the beginning of the movie, she is a superb highschool pupil and the movie will accompany her throughout her first months of faculty in school. Fatima is each a practising and lesbian Muslim, a respectful and a distraught, footballer and literary woman. All the audacity, all of the originality of the movie is as a result of presence on the display of this younger woman who thwarts all of the clichés, doesn’t enter any field.
Read too “Borgo” fortunately renews the jail thrillerOn the shape, the movie is sober. No digital camera that brakes, no documentary phantasm, however fixed consideration to the grain of actuality. Whether we’re in a suburban HLM – particularly within the kitchen the place Fatima’s mom prepares sweets for her three daughters -, within the college restaurant when Fatima has new friendships or in a homosexual nightclub, every scene is a bit of life stuffed with touching or humorous particulars, by no means the chance for a militant speech.
This fixed requirement makes it potential to flee the archetypes which might be normally, on the display, those that populate the panorama of the movie: the household of Algerian immigrants, the Parisian college students from a rich surroundings, lesbian activists … Here, everyone seems to be a singular and complicated being which is rarely restricted to its id.
A big shut -up of a uncommon depth
Of course, Fatima is torn aside by the issue she feels to be herself. The movie opens onto a prayer scene at daybreak, and, on a number of events, we see it doing its ritual ablutions, pray. While his household doesn’t appear significantly practising, Fatima is a believer, and the movie treats his religion like all the opposite parts of his life, with respect.
Therefore, there is no such thing as a want to elucidate why she will get indignant once we deal with her from Lesbian in highschool, or preserve an obstinate silence at her home, letting her sisters joke her on the husband whom she could have bother discovering. Nor why, when she lives a break that devastates her, she doesn’t speak in confidence to anybody. In a detailed -up of a uncommon emotional depth, Fatima resists her mom tries to push her to open her coronary heart.
Read too Mélanie Thierry, physique and soul
To uncover
The kangaroo of the day
Answer
And then, there may be this astonishing scene the place Fatima goes to an imam to take his recommendation, that in a movie the place the sexual scenes are frank, the place the sensuality which awakens in a younger lesbian girl is on the coronary heart of historical past. It takes braveness to inform this, to movie it.
The imam explains that the Koran prohibits homosexuality. He quotes suras, advises the woman to not despair however somewhat to hunt a husband. This will not be what Fatima will do, even when – we are able to guess it in an limitless finish – its path is not going to be simple. It is with a quiet pressure that Hafsia Herzi accompanies her heroine and helps her along with her stunning beneficiant look, the identical look that makes her some of the distinguished actresses of French cinema.
https://www.lepoint.fr/culture/la-petite-derniere-d-hafsia-herzi-donne-un-coup-de-fouet-au-festival-de-cannes-16-05-2025-2589742_3.php