Screened in competition at the 76th Berlinale, In A Whisper [+leggi anche:
recensione
intervista: Leyla Bouzid
scheda film] is the third feature film by Tunisian director Leyla Bouzid, following on from As I Open My Eyes [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Leyla Bouzid
scheda film] (selected in Venice’s Giornate degli Autori line-up in 2015) and A Tale of Love and Desire [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
scheda film] (showcased in Cannes’ Critics’ Week in 2021).

Cineuropa: Where did you get the idea for this film set in Sousse in Tunisia. Is there an autobiographical element to it?
Leyla Bouzid: It all started with me wanting to film my maternal grandmother’s home, where I spent all my summers as a child. That house always felt incredibly film-friendly, like it had a soul, and I’d always told myself I’d make a film there one day. When my grandmother died in 2017, that desire felt even more urgent because the house would probably be sold and, in all likelihood, knocked down. In the beginning, there was also the figure of the grandmother and the uncle whose life was in some respects ruined or sacrificed. The film is partly inspired by stories within my family, but it’s all fictionalised. The structure of the family is a lot like mine, but the characters evolved, and I invented the story.

What narrative thread did you prioritise?
Firstly, the idea of being marked by the rhythms of the highly ritualised and different moments that come with death and starting with the act of bringing out the body, as it’s experienced by women, since the men go to the cemetery while the women stay at home. I wanted Lilia to arrive during that event and for her to slowly realise that there’s a mystery to solve. And for the film to gradually re-direct us from why the uncle is dead to what his life was like and how it’s going to shed light on or lend new direction to Lilia’s life: to go from an investigation to an examination and from an external examination to a personal one, with the idea of passing something on, as if the uncle, his soul, his ghost, was going to feed into Lilia’s trajectory.

You do it all without melodrama: it’s all about looks, things left unsaid, a gradual exploration.
Yes, I wanted to work on things left unsaid, on the fact that there’s a family secret that everyone knows but that no-one’s ever talked about. We don’t even know how we know about it: we feel certain things, but they’re never actually spoken about. That death finally gets them talking about it, albeit a little late, but it’s not a spectacular moment. That passing on of the family secret, that taboo, becomes a part of their inner selves; in any case, Lilia has absorbed it so deeply into her being that she feels she can’t talk to her mother and tell her who she is. But Lilia has misinterpreted what her mother thinks and the conflict between her mother and the deceased was far more complicated than she thought. At the heart of the film is the transmission of family secrets, taboos which will have repercussions for everyone and which will be critical to who each of them are, even though they’ll never say it out loud.

Your film refers to article 230 of the Civil Code which criminalises homosexuality, but it’s not a protest film.
It was really important to address that criminalisation, but a film can’t be a activist tract. What I’m interested in is the characters, their inner worlds, complexity. The grandmother, for example, is quite western because she’s Tunisian but she can’t read Arabic. She’s traditional, but I wasn’t interested in characterising her as some kind of tormentor, even if she did pressure her son to get married and to fit into certain box. It’s the complexity of situations that interests me, how they’re absorbed into the characters’ inner worlds and how it leads to an inner battle to assert one’s identity. As for Lilia, she’s troubled, like an exiled character. She draws a very clear line between her life and family in Tunisia and the one we imagine she has in Paris. And ultimately that line breaks up, because we can’t split ourselves in half.

The film revolves around female characters.
That gynaeceum is quite a natural thing. The grandmother, the aunt, the mother and Lilia: three generations of women carry that family history inside of them. I wanted to focus on women of a certain age because in film, we mostly show young women. As for the couple composed of Lilia and Alice, there are very few, if any, depictions of female couples who love one another in the Arab world, and therefore opportunities to feel represented, so I wanted to film that love.

What about the occasional superposition of the past and the present in the same image?
That idea came to me very early on in the process. I wasn’t sure about covering different time periods in the film. I wanted to recreate the impression we get when we arrive in a grandmother’s house where we’ve spent a lot of time as children, the power of childhood memories and how they interact with the present. But I didn’t want to use flashbacks, so I created that interaction, those shared looks between her child self and her adult self. Those fragments of resurfacing memories feed into the present. It’s a motif of omnipresence which is also a kind of reflection around childhood which is like a ghost. And the deceased uncle also has a bit of a presence, like a ghost. There are even times when we don’t know what’s really happening. You could call it the mental image.

Was chiaroscuro your main focus when it came to photography?
I worked with director of photography Sébastien Goepfert. Even though there’s a lot of light and intense sunshine outside, there’s always a sense of semi-darkness inside the house, and also of it being a little bit closed in on itself. At the beginning of the film, it’s quite dark, the light only comes in at interstices, but little by little it penetrates the house and it ends on a far sunnier moment. And Lilia and her mother actually cut back the branches and greenery themselves, actively helping the light to come in through the windows.