As she did in her debut feature, Sofia [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Meryem Benm'Barek
fiche film], which won the Best Screenplay Award in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard in 2018, Meryem Benm’Barek once again looks to tackle societal expectations around gender and the impact of socioeconomic class in contemporary Morocco in her next work, Behind the Palm Trees. The Rabat-born director presents her Tangier-set sophomore feature first on its national stage – it has just enjoyed its world premiere in the Official Competition of the 22nd Marrakech International Film Festival.

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Trained as an architect but working at his father’s construction business, Mehdi (Driss Ramdi) meets and is immediately enamoured by a white French woman named Marie (Sara Giraudeau, of The Bureau [+lire aussi :
interview : Frédéric Lavigne
fiche série] fame), the daughter of his father’s new clients. Marie – who doesn't work but simply lives off her family’s generational wealth – quickly reciprocates, seemingly fascinated by the young man. Her family’s villa is littered with colonial-era and colonial-esque objects, her behaviour harbouring a slightly menacing quality in its curiosity. At the same time, her interest in seeing him succeed feels genuine, albeit naïve: she convinces Mehdi that her father can help him secure an architecture job in Paris, freeing him of the so-called shackles that she believes bind him to Tangier.

Behind the Palm Trees opens by embracing Tangier’s innate oceanside beauty, its title a nod to the shadows lurking beneath the surface, with intimate and sensual cinematography by Son Doan (who lensed Benm’Barek's first film as well as, more recently, Viet and Nam [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film]). Mehdi’s exciting, illicit sexual relationship with Marie provides something more than what he feels he has with Selma (Nadia Kounda), a Moroccan woman happily ready to marry him. Over the course of the film, our hero slowly turns into a villain as he is corrupted by his desire for Marie – or, rather, what she represents – and he starts lying to Selma and those around him.

Benm’Barek’s intriguing feature has the makings of a movie with a potent and striking commentary on class, opportunity, postcolonial legacy, cultural norms and the eroticisation of the exotic. Yet, it is repeatedly deflated by the clichés to which it bends, building archetypical characters that rely on constructed binaries – prudishness versus promiscuity, collectivism versus the pursuit of individual happiness – to drive their actions. We can tangibly feel Mehdi’s confusion as he is plunged into conversations in French with Marie’s parents – it's a language he knows full well, but their content is abstracted by performativity and hifalutin language that he can’t follow. However, his motivations over the course of the film ultimately descend into a whirlpool of story and character choices that feel misguided and unnuanced despite the film’s promising thematic baseline.

The music by Jim Williams, which begins as cryptic and perhaps foreboding at the start of the movie, later returns as a motif that has a horror- or thriller-like quality. The eerily open, yet at times questioning, behaviour of Marie's family at one point might make viewers think that the film is treading slowly towards Get Out territory. In the end, however, it’s simply the out-of-touch mannerisms and actions of the wealthy that get the spine tingling.

Behind the Palm Trees is a production by Tessalit Productions (France), Furyo Films (France), Chi-Fou-Mi Productions (France), Novak Production (Belgium), The Bureau (UK) and Agora Films (Morocco). Pyramide Internationale holds the rights to its world sales.