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Halfaouine: Child of the Terraces (Asfour Stah) – Summary and Analysis

Summary:

With his mother’s agreement, 12-year old Noura, looking younger than his age, is still admitted to the women’s hammam in Halfaouine, a neighbourhood in Tunis. His older friends ask him to provide licentious details on the life in the hammam and on the bodies of the women taking baths there. On the day of his brother’s circumcision, an act that repulses him, Noura is excluded from the hammam because he approaches a bather too closely. After this he is obliged to visit the men’s baths with his father. He approaches the young servant Leila sensually, which results in her dismissal. He also loses the complicity of Salih, a libertarian poet arrested by the police for his anti-conformist political propositions. He dwells on fantastic images from his childhood; that of a disturbing, bearded ogre and that of a man with castrating scissors. Practically isolated, as if chased from paradise, finding himself between a rock and a hard place, not knowing any longer if he should join the adult world or if he wants to stay young so as not to be far from women, he responds with a mocking laughter to his father’s prohibitions and escapes onto the terraces of the neighbourhood toward an uncertain future.

Analysis:

The film is a fairy tale (the director’s father was a librarian and a storyteller), that of a difficult passage from the world of children to the world of adults, a traumatising initiation into the formation of the libido, into the desire for women. The hammam, which Western literature and painting have portrayed since the eighteenth century, offers Noura an opportunity to approach with an indiscrete gaze the bodies of women, without veils, in a sensuous atmosphere where the vaporous warmth puts reason to sleep, where one puts one’s guard down and where social etiquette is weakened.

These modern odalisques have the taste of forbidden fruit. The film tells with fervour, without discourse, how a sexual initiation happens, against the forces forbidding all liberation, against the Islamist precepts of religious master Mokhtar, against the advice of his father (‘a man never cries, a man doesn’t hang around with women’), bothered by the vulgar questions posed by his two macho friends.

Largely inspired by the life of a perfectly Westernised director, but also inscribed within a culture where in 1990 the crude description of sexuality is still impossible, this films locates itself on a territory that Western filmmakers have evoked more crudely, in particular that of a young man’s sexual initiation into brothels, sometimes recommended and organised by the parents themselves (nothing better than professionalism in this matter!). The films of François Truffaut starring JeanPierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel come to mind.

Boughedir also evokes the Western myth of the harem here, liberally described and painted in Europe in the eighteenth century. We discover the very modern idea that the female body captured in opacity and an aesthetically seductive tepidness evokes more desire than complete, realistic and anatomical nudity.

Thus the hammam invokes the harem by inversion, this confined space of women (recalling the gynaecium of antiquity) where the master and lord comes to choose a mistress who will be prepared in the baths by the servants (cf. 1001 Nights). Noura will have known the ancestral desire for the harem without having had a chance to satisfy it. Expulsed from the body of the woman, and having symbolically killed the father, he will topple into another story, another culture, unknown and intimidating. ‘I am fascinated by the women in my country. They have a kind of genius of life. They have managed, despite everything, to have fewer constraints than men …. I wanted to show that the laughter of women is the most powerful thing in the world. In this moment [when they laugh after the husband enters and leaves the courtyard], they are in charge of the house. The joy of women is stronger than any dogma.’ 1 The body of the women in the hammam is sublimated by the vision of the still innocent preadolescent. They have an appearance of freedom, but only in the domestic space, not in public.

There are four female figures in the film:

1. Noura’s mother, young and pretty, her son’s accomplice, lies in order to allow him to enter the hammam with her, and defends him when his father mistreats him.

2. Latifa, young and sexy, dressed in Western fashion, divorced and thus free, provocative, goes to secretly get her ‘shot’ (i.e. see her lover) every day!

3. Salouha, emotionally unhappy, close to insanity, is at the mercy of the fundamentalist chief, a victim of the intolerance against women.

4. Leila, in a welcoming corset, provides Noura with a practical substitute for the buxom nudities of the hammam.

Ferid Boughedir is a perfect representative of an artist and intellectual with close ties to Western culture. A regular at the Cinémathèque française, assistant to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Francisco Arrabal, film critic and author of a dissertation on African cinemas, he sees this Tunisian society in the midst of transformation from a modern Western point of view: ‘these were things I didn’t feel until I was in Paris’. 2 He both manages to escape censorship in Tunisia and knows how to satisfy an international audience.

The women in the hammam are extras, French beurettes (French women of North African origin) who accepted the roles because of a certain integrity of the film’s gaze, which did not shock them, and which also convinced Tunisian censorship.

The question of Islamic fundamentalism is present but there is neither a political analysis nor an answer to the problem of fundamentalism itself. The film is not anti-religious; it only stigmatises taboos that lead to hypocrisy and intolerance. It depicts an ‘Arab society where everything is taboo and where real life transpires via a succession of small transgressions’. 3 It gives the shoemaker, the ‘clown’ of the neighbourhood, the only one who secretly tells the truth because he is a poet, who is under the surveillance of a still moderate police, a gentle hint of freedom. Cohabitation is still possible between the generations and between political positions; conflicts will emerge later.

There is however a social truth in the depiction of the inhabitants’ behaviour which could usefully interest anthropologists and sociologists. Halfaouine represents a small microcosm that recalls the films of French filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, a theatre of the everyday where people exchange things, observe each other without hate (at the barber’s, at the market), where the women of the men who claim authority exchange saucy stories about them, and where everyday life is above all peaceful. The scene of the circumcision, even if it repulses Noura, is treated like a secular religious custom difficult to condemn.

Let us add that despite the film’s Mediterranean setting, a touristic vision, an exotic Tunisia of souks, is absent. The only concession to an architectural geography of the South can be found in the omnipresence of the terraces which have a double symbolic function, as they facilitate a ‘horizontal communication’ floating above the vaporous roundness of the hammam, as well as an escape towards a world above, dissident, still to be reached, a symbolism also found in other films, such as Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937) and A Special Day (Ettore Scola, 1977).

Daniel Armogathe (translated by Sabine Haenni)

Notes

1. Bernard Génin, ‘L’hymne à la joie’, interview with Ferid Boughedir, Télérama, 26 September 1990.

2. Nicolas Saada, ‘Halfaouine’, Les Cahiers du cinéma, No. 433, June 1990, p. 61.

3. Ferid Boughedir in L’Evénement du jeudi, 27 September 1990.

Cast and Crew:

[Country: Tunisia, France. Production Company: Cinétéléfilms, Scarabée Films, FranceMedia, La SEPT, RTT, WDR. Producers: Ahmed Attia, Hassen Daldoul, Eliane Stutterheim. Director: Ferid Boughedir. Screenwriters: Ferid Boughedir, Nouri Bouzid, Taoufik Jebali, Maryse León García. Cinematographer: Georges Barsky. Music: Anouar Braham. Editor: Moufida Tlatli. Cast: Selim Boughedir (Noura), Mustapha Adouani (Si Azzouz), Rabia Ben Abdallah (La Jamila), Mohamed Driss (Salih), Hélène Catzaras (Latifa), Fatima Ben Saidane (Salouha), Abdelhamid Gayess (Cheikh Mokhtar), Jamel Sassi (Moncef), Radhouane Meddeb (Mounir), Carolyn Chelby (Leila).]

Further Reading:

Ferid Boughedir interview, You Tube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BAOyBEI9lI.

Sonia Chamkhi, Le cinéma tunisien à la lumière de la modernité (1996–2006), Tunis, Centre de publication universitaire, 2009.

Jean-Michel Frodon, ‘Regard d’enfance’, Le Monde, 27 September 1990.

Jacques Grant, Halfaouine, Ministère de l’Education nationale, Collège au cinéma, Dossier 40, Paris, C.N.C., 1992.

Sélim Nassib, ‘Sexe, Femmes et Halfaouine’, Libération, 27 September 1990.

Vinent Ostria, ‘L’œil du désir, Cahiers du cinéma, No. 435, September 1990, 67–8. www.cinematunisien.com

Source Credits:

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.

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