A- | A Tunisian family tells their story, aided by two actors who play absent sisters. Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania Review by Jon Kissel |
That question becomes gradually more apparent long before Olfa herself asks it. Early recollections of her childhood have her rebelling against the boxes that Tunisian society would put her in. Raised in another family without a male presence, she takes it upon herself to defend her mother and her sisters, and she does so by becoming what she imagines men to be, namely quick to anger and achieving a physique that makes violence into a credible solution. This rebellious attitude is empowering for herself, culminating in a hilariously dark wedding night where she beats her insistent husband and pretends his blood is evidence that the marriage has been consummated. However, when she does allow her useless husband to have sex with her and get her pregnant, resulting in four girls over seven years, Olfa is ill-equipped to raise women. The misogynistic world she lives in treats masculinity as a force of nature and femininity as a cultural responsibility to be protected, thus defining women as temptresses who are at best careless and at worst whores while absolving men of the despicable behavior that all the film’s examples regularly engage in. As the actors learn about this family and give convincing enough portrayals to move Olfa, Eya, and Tayssir, so too did Olfa learn to play a role. Part of that role was to see women in the way that the men of the film do, including her own daughters.
As the film moves away from Olfa’s experience and towards Eya’s and Tayssir’s, more of the meta narrative comes into play. Like in Act of Killing, the explicit request to have them tell their story in front of a camera prods them to consider it and put it into words for perhaps the first time. Both girls are worried that speaking so freely will make their mother treat them differently, and they wouldn’t have that worry if they regularly talked about what happened to them. Olfa is shown to be a woman with huge blind spots borne out of selfishness. Her story of the Tunisian Arab Spring revolution is beautiful, where a political revolution for her country inspires a personal one for her. She divorces her husband, seemingly to never be heard from again, and she takes up with a man who she was clearly and perhaps still is in love with. He moves in and the family achieves something like domestic bliss, except for the fact that he’s a convicted murderer who escaped from prison and proceeds to molest all of Olfa’s daughters. Olfa notably has nothing to say about this, but Eya and Tayssir do, with the former revealing murderous rage and the latter torn apart by her inability to bridge the mental gap between what he did to her and how he was nevertheless the first loving paternal presence in her life. Olfa is described by her daughters as not protective but resentful, like an eight year old girl seduced the love of her life away from her.
That this harrowing anecdote doesn’t provide the film with enough power to get to the end credits demonstrates how eventful this family’s existence has been. Olfa doesn’t become a better mother after her boyfriend is put back in jail. She finds work in Libya and is regularly there, leaving her daughters to their own devices at a very young age. They live recognizably rebellious teenage lives, prompting Olfa to return and beat Ghofrane into unconsciousness. Meanwhile, Islamic fundamentalism is taking root in Tunisia. Where the dictator Ben Ali previously outlawed head scarves, the opposite is taking place in a cultural, off-the-books way. As Ghofrane and Rahma become more religious, this becomes especially true in their own home as they bully first Eya and then Olfa herself into full-body niqabs. With Rahma as the enforcer, embodied in a stunningly haughty performance by the actor portraying her teenage self, the daughters become unreachable and Ghofrane and Raham are ultimately married to ISIS fighters in Libya. The film ends with them both in a Libyan prison, Ghofrane’s young daughter in tow.
Four Daughters is a heartbreaking tragedy on so many levels. Olfa is trapped in a culture that doesn’t value her. Two of her daughters and her granddaughter landed in the same place. Her other two daughters narrowly avoided the same fate, though their childhoods were marked by abuse and fear and loss. That loss is most embodied by the inclusion of the actors playing Ghofrane and Rahma, who instantly gel with Eya and Tayssir and produce endearing portraits of sisterly bonding and love, even when they’re trying on niqabs together. In this scene, the viewer doesn’t need to see their faces to know how much they enjoy being with each other, even with the falseness of the film’s premise. Somehow, despite all of their mother’s flaws and their trauma, Eya and Tayssir make this film feel optimistic. They appear to be fully-formed and confident women who are going to avoid their mother’s and their sisters’ mistakes. Olfa is shocked at the way she recapitulated so many previous generations, but her daughters won’t come to the same conclusion. So many things are broken in Four Daughters, but the cycle of misogyny and self-hatred, the only thing here worth breaking, is as well. A-