A Maghreb son tries to hide the autobiographical character of his book. A tender but unequal comedy by Baya Kasmi, with Ramzy Bedia.
by Jacques Mandelbaum
What we like at Baya Kasmi, it’s his side in the way. We remember the scenario she co -signed with Michel Leclerc, for the names of the people (2010), in which a certain Bahia Benmahmoud (Sara Forestier), activist of the radical left, sleeps with all the men on the right who cross her path To convert them to the values of fairness sharing of wealth. Until the day she meets Arthur Martin (Jacques Gamblin), an obsessive precautionary she takes for a fascist, but who turns out to be such a discreet socialist on her Jewish origins that she highlights her Arab origins.
She returns today as a director, still in co -writing with Michel Leclerc, to stage a southern family of Maghreb origin, with a blasphemous humor that would rather come from Philip Roth or Woody Allen. Everything starts from Youssef Salem (Ramzy Bedia), in his forties who is inspired by her own childhood and his own family to write an explosive novel on the repression of sex and the hypocrisy of behaviors relating to this sensitive question, vis-à- Vis from which the family policy in force consists in looking at and safeguarding appearances. Entitled the toxic shock, the work refers to the legend which threatened, in Algeria, the lovers who committed the act outside the wedding roads, struck that they were, therefore, by a kind of fatal lightning.
exuberant editor
The novel, whose film “reconstitutes” scenes that sometimes go as far as phantasmagoria, actually unpacks part of the life of Salem: hidden homosexuality of the sister who lives with a girl she presents to her Family like his roommate, strange customs of the father who disguises himself in his spare time, beginning of the mother’s romance with the lifeguard … Not to mention Youssef, who is seen as a teenager obsessed with the thing, masturbating in The swimming pool by rereading the girls, before seeing her mother there and fearing to have put her pregnant! Having become an adult, the same, not to worry his parents as much as to have peace, makes them believe that he is about to marry, in Paris, with a woman who left him two years ago.
Everything gets complicated when, passing through a slightly heckled literary program in which he must fight against a Muslim indigenist and an extreme right -wing henchman, Youssef sees, thanks to social networks, his reputation take off, and soon the Goncourt price is interested in him. If this delights his exuberant editor (Noémie Lvovsky), who also has explicitly carnal views about his foal, Youssef, meanwhile, spends his time on the sets to deny the autobiographical character of his novel and hide from his parents, As much as possible, even if it means smashing their television position, its rising glory. While her brothers and sisters, whose youngest returned to a rigorous Islam, want to make her skin, everything is going well, with insolence and alacrity, lighting without complex the fires of the imaginary and the possibilities.
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