Not only is "Halfaouine" the most successful and watched Tunisian movie of all time but it's also a wonderful reflection of the so typical mores in moorish countries regarding many taboo subjects, on the top of them: sex. And yet this is not a political movie Ferid Boughedi made; choosing the very standpoint of a pre-teen, which means a kid caught between two ages, he shows the difficult passing from infancy to adulthood in societies where adolescence is hardly considered.
Noura, the carrier of the adolescent gaze that overarches the whole story, embodies the internal conflict of a kid who wants to stay among women: feeling their gentleness, their comfort, their ability to provide love and tenderness and his progression into manhood with a more dominant and aggressive view on the female persuasion. That his area of exploration is a hammam didn't surprise me because as a kid who grew up in Morocco, I still remember being taken with my mother to these sanctuaries of voluptuousness, where I concealed my discomfort with steam and hot water through the unique occasion to watch women's bodies.
The film is about a sort of voyeurism but deprived from any sexual impulse, how could Noura anyway? Having not reached the age of puberty, his gaze is one of fascination and admiration, and the camera of Boughedi couldn't have been more expressive. What is the purpose of cinema when you think about it? Isn't it to transport us into a specific world and show one reality through a perspective that might not be ours? In our age where young people are too flooded with Internet images, here's a a film that shows nudity with poetry, sensuality, with a serenity that women display when they are in their place.
Some accused Boughedi of employing prostitutes to play the naked women and you can tell by the nerve of these detractors how fresh and self-cathartic the film was. The women in the hammam were extras displaying their bodies with the same sense of freedom women always had behind closed doors, out of the realm of the sordid venality of men and their eternal Madonna-wh*** complex, Scorsese made good movies about that. Only the innocence of a child and teen-to-be could throw these perceptions away. Noura has still that innocence.
Location also plays a significant part to the film, this is the old Medina, known as the casbah, the headquarters of the guerilla army in "Battle of Algiers" or the refuge of Pepe Le Moko. This time, we have the beautiful quarter of Tunis, known as Halfaouine, where women wander along the streets wearing long white veils and resisting the verbal assaults from young kids. The film doesn't fall in the trap of machismo vs. women, in a key scene, there's the shoemaker who flirts with one of these veil-clad women and it goes even further. As the wise man says, "men propose and women dispose". The film clearly establishes that women have the same needs and inclinations for the forbidden fruit as long as it doesn't express itself through harassment or "eye rape".
But the cultural burden is too strong and so women have their freedom in closed doors when men are absent, translating their needs through dances, sexual innuendos and chants while men can talk of politics at their jobs or in the hairdresser. Noura's place is the terrace where he can access to both worlds at once, going from the company of men to a little spot where he can gaze at women preparing the couscous and commenting on men. The terrace becomes a sort of Freudian metaphor to this bridge between childhood and the adult age; childhood is incarnated by women, and adulthood by men.
All the scenes show women teasing Noura, infantilizing him, they want to keep him among them, except for the hammam tenant who considers he's too old. His trick is to look like a simpleton, but it doesn't last long and one day, he's caught staring at a woman and is chased from the hammam forever. This is a violent scene, one that echoes the part where his father punishes him for hanging around with bad boys, the scenes show that the entrance to manhood is synonym of violence, his father beats him into becoming a boy, and when he's kicked out of the hammam, it's brutal. Another scene shows the circumcision of a little boy, another rite of passage that goes through pain and cries for boys, and one shows protestants being beaten by the police, this is the men's world.
And torn between this dichotomy of love and violence, Noura is in a sort of an emotional no-man's land where he tries to be a man and feels rather powerless because he's still in need of women, he doesn't know why but he can feel it. The story, all in humor, wit and sensuality, encapsulates the tragicomedy of Arab societies: less impregnated by the "original sin", they kept a wall of misunderstanding between women and men and children are literally asexual but girls are warned against the ogre who makes young women bleed. And in this arena of confusion, we rarely see men and women interacting, except for an occasional flirting, each gender speaks a language.
Men are as sexually aroused as teenagers and women not as stuck-up as they look, but society must maintain its dignity and pretend that some issues don't exist, same goes with the other forbidden themes: religion and politics. And "Halfaouine" or the "Bird of the Terrace" works on so many levels, I especially loved the performance of Boughedi's nephew, as Noura, his look carries all the innocence and naughtiness of children and its emotional reward is the final smile he gives the camera where ignoring the threats of his father, he smiles to life that finally could give him a break.
"Halfaouine" is a marvelous coming-of-age movie that hasn't lost any of its delightful touch even 30 years after its making.
