09/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: Tunisian director Mehdi Barsaoui’s thriller follows a young woman who bravely seeks a new identity after surviving a bus crash

Mehdi Barsaoui premiered his debut, A Son [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mehdi M Barsaoui and Sami B…
film profile], in the Orizzonti competition at Venice in 2019, with the film’s successful run culminating in a César Award win for its lead actor, Sami Bouajila; five years later, he returns to Venice to showcase Aïcha [+see also:
trailer
film profile] in Orizzonti, where it has won the parallel award of Best Mediterranean Film from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice.

Aïcha feels like a film where “everything” happens: a top-to-bottom accounting of Tunisian society in its post-revolution state, with the eponymous character played by Fatma Sfar cycling through many different social worlds, and identities both real and metaphorical. You could call the screenplay overstuffed and risking plausibility, yet there’s such an energy to how it’s brought to life by Barsaoui, with the feeling of Dickens in its ripe array of incidents as the lead goes from rags to at least semi-riches, and considering the legal loopholes through which the plot ultimately resolves itself.

And just as Great Expectations opens with uncertainty upon what its hero, Pip, is actually named, Sfar’s character starts the film as Aya in the desert town of Tozeur, assumes an identity in the more sparkly Tunis as Amira, and then concludes the film as Aïcha, itself meaning “alive” in Arabic. Proving again that there are few dull films with hotels as primary locations, Aya begins the story cleaning wealthy tourists’ bedsheets and serving seafood at plush buffets in her hospitality job, before a bus, which takes her from work to the modest parental home where she still lives, tragically crashes on a treacherous desert road. Crawling to safety, she spots the emergency services marking her name down as deceased and, spotting a savvy opportunity, doesn’t correct them, heading to her dream location of Tunis with Airbnb listings open on her phone.

Here, she settles in as a flatmate with Lobna (Yasmine Dimassi), a Humanities PhD student as she tells it, who introduces her to the city’s nightlife (underlining its reputation as one of the Arab world’s most liberal countries) and an array of powerful men to date. When she witnesses one of these men being murdered by the police, her deception risks catching up with her as she’s questioned by the investigator Farès (local star Nidhal Saadi), who wants to protect the law enforcement’s reputation whilst harbouring a dawning moral streak of his own.

That is just a mere outline, and Barsaoui nests little red herrings and clues as he assembles the plot structure, all making Aïcha very engaging to follow as it unfolds. With the movie’s focus on identities in flux, Aya/Amira’s progress also evokes Titane [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Julia Ducournau, Vincent Li…
film profile] as it tracks an unsteady, messy process of feminine liberation (and also in its lens flare-speckled photography), where she wriggles away just as various men attempt to pin her down. And they are hypocrites as well, because various reveals and “twists” in the plot convey that Aya isn’t the only one concealing vital facts about herself. That Aïcha was based on real stories emerging after the revolution undercuts its tendency towards corner-cutting: when seeing unlikely news reports verified in the press, we’re hardly able to believe them either.

Aïcha is a co-production by Tunisia, France, Italy, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, staged by Cinetelefilms, Dolce Vita Films, Dorje Film and 13 Prods. Its world sales are overseen by The Party Film Sales.