Over the past month I saw two movies I’d like to comment about – an Egyptian and a French-speaking Belgian. Shehrezade is an Egyptian movie played by Mona Zaki and was all over the news in Egypt as one of her more important films. It was also deemed ‘controversial’ because it spoke of the hijab. I went to see it with anticipation but also without much expectation because usually such films do not deliver. True to form, this one did not either.
The film purports to speak of women’s issues in a closed society that does not recognize their individuality. This is portrayed through three separate stories, all connected by one thread which is a television show with its newly married presenter, Mona Zaki. Zaki herself, throughout the movie, is showing us the progression – or regression – of her own second marriage. 
Hence the name of the movie: she is Shehrezade telling us separate stories as the audience realizes that she herself is under threat as well and her story is yet another story of the oppression of women. The film ends with Zaki’s husband beating her up and she goes on the airwaves badly bruised to narrate her own story, a scene reminiscent of the Saudi presenter Rania Al Baz whose husband beat her unconscious in 2005 after which she fled to France.
The ‘controversial issue’ of the hijab was only one sentence that one of the characters said, that she felt like she had a ’split personality’ because she wore the hijab on the street but while working at a beauty shop in the mall, she abides by its rules and does not wear the hijab. After that this character disappears and a new story begins.
Overall, it is a great idea for a movie but the stories were so separate that by the time you finished one, you literally forgot it and moved on to the next. While that is the whole point of the story – or stories – nevertheless the thread that holds them together is not strong enough. The story therefore falls apart like little fragmented pieces. The time dedicated to each story was uneven, so the first story was extremely short and seemed totally prematurely cut off, whereas the last story of the three spinster sisters who murdered the man they all wanted to marry seemed excessively long and overpowered the movie. Certainly the strongest story was the presenter’s story herself, but that was not enough to salvage the movie.
Is it worth seeing? I would say yes. Just try to ignore its disastrous shortcomings.
The second movie I saw was Lorna’s Silence – a film directed and screen-written by Belgian directors Jean and Luc Dardenne and acted by Arta Dobroshi, a Kosovian actress in real life. The film revolves around Lorna, an Albanian woman, who becomes involved in the underworld of marriage-for-citizenship schemes. It certainly is also about how poor women become commodities in the hands of ruthless men who want to only make money through them, completely uninterested in how they feel or not feel.
Lorna’s boyfriend is in on the scheme too. They both plan to buy a restaurant with the money she will make through a marriage with a Russian ‘buyer’, arranged by Fabio, a mobster taxi-driver. As an Albanian, she herself had to marry someone to get the Belgian citizenship. Indeed Fabio marries her off to a ‘junkie’ called Claudy who agrees only because he wanted to use the money he will get from Fabio to maintain his drug habit. All Lorna had to do was tolerate her marriage until she got the citizenship. As Claudy fell deeper and deeper into his drugs, Lorna tried desperately to detach herself from him. However when she learns of Fabio’s intent on killing him with a ‘drug overdose’, she tries and helps him overcome his habit and sends him to rehab. She tries to convince Fabio that they could just divorce and there was no need to kill Claudy but Fabio was not interested. As time went by, Lorna became more deeply and emotionally entangled with Claudy and one evening they sleep with each other. The following day, Claudy is dead. He was killed by Fabio in order to hasten things with the Russian buyer who did not want to wait for a divorce. Lorna was silent.
One of the most memorable scenes was when Lorna, Fabio the Russian and his translator went to a restaurant to set a timeline for their marriage and to discuss ‘business’. they were talking about her as though she was not there, and throughout she remained silent. Fabio asked them to dance in order to have witnesses that will testify that they ‘knew each other’ when they investigated his citizenship request. While dancing, Lorna picks up her courage and asks him if he was ok if she was pregnant! Since the Russian could not understand English, he thought she wanted to get pregnant with him and called on his translator to tell her no he did not want that. As she tried desperately to silence him Fabio intervenes and reassures the Russian that everything would be ok. Once out of the restaurant Fabio beats Lorna up and tells her that she will have to go through an abortion.
The silent Lorna was told at the hospital that she was not pregnant at all, but she was not convinced. Her boyfriend left her and the Russian refused to marry her and she knew that Fabio would kill her. The film ends with her in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, talking to her ‘baby’ and telling him that they will not kill him like they killed his father because she would protect him.
And so Lorna remained silent till the end and yet not inactive. A tragic heroine – a modern version of Tess of the D’Urbeville. The film was powerful, all-engaging, and very intense. It is one of those films that make you sit in your chair after the movie is over just trying to wrap your head around the question ‘what the heck just happened?’ Dobroshi’s award-winning acting revealed the depth of emotions that she went through during the different stages in the film even without saying much. Her expressive depth of emotions together with her attempts at indifference portrayed the conflict she was feeling inside: poverty had taken its toll and she was struggling between a desire to live a better life sometime in the future by acting indifferent to other people at present [use and be used], and on the other hand her deep moral desire to do what is right and moral although it would still lead to more poverty.
No wonder the film won best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival among other awards. It is a very profound movie – and Lorna’s silence said so much more than what Shehrezade narrated. Silence is sometimes gold.
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I just saw the documentary Garbage Dreams on the Egyptian al Zabbaleen area by Mai Iskandar in the Rhode Island International Film Festival. It is indeed a great documentary – very moving and concise.
