An aspiring ballet dancer is forced to change the course of her life when she’s attacked on her way home one night in Houria, a drama bursting with female energy and power despite its predictable storyline and an over-abundance of optimistic, self-congratulatory scenes celebrating female creativity. In some ways it feels like part two of director Mounia Meddour’s notable Papicha, which won a French César for best first feature and was selected as Algeria’s 2020 Oscar submission. Houria boasts the same energy of youthful defiance that is always exciting to watch, and there are several scenes that break out of standard scripting to reach genuine emotional peaks.
But these riveting moments created by the acting and directing are few and far between, and Houria is unlikely to advance Meddour’s art house credits much. After making a tour of small fests in France and Italy, the Algeria-set drama will be tested for its appeal to Arab audiences at the Cairo Film Festival, where it is screening in the competitive Horizons of Arab Cinema program.
It includes the welcome return, in the title role, of exuberant Algerian-French actress Lyna Khoudri, who played an aspiring fashion designer fighting conservative Algerian society in the earlier film and earned a César as Most Promising Actress. Here the battle is mainly within herself, as she struggles to make some sort of personal comeback after a broken ankle full of metal pins puts paid to her dream of becoming a ballet star.
The opening scenes underline her dedication as Houria rehearses the lead role in Swan Lake in a humble dance studio run by her mother (Rachida Brakni), a stern taskmaster whose stinging criticism of her students’ posture and facial expressions hides a warm heart. The girls’ iconic white feather crowns make a nice contrast with the poor surroundings, where neighborhood boys spy through the windows and tease them.
Back home, Houria continues rehearsing on the rooftop of their apartment building, dancing en pointe with hanging laundry and the Mediterranean sea as a backdrop. There is no sign of her father, and the circumstances surrounding his tragic absence are saved for later in an anticlimactic reveal.
While the young dancer’s commitment to perfection in her art is admirable, it is very clear she’s cruising for a bruising when, at night, she dons a dark hoodie and attends an all-male back street betting sport: ram fighting. Amusingly, the contestants’ fur is painted with names like Donald Trump, Obama and Bin Ladin. Distressingly, they really do butt heads with sickening finality and the sound effects are ratcheted up to make each blow sound lethal. This is one of the few scenes populated by male characters in what is basically an all-woman film, and it is here that Houria is targeted by Ali (an intense Marwan Fares), a sinister loose wire with a dark past. Their confrontation is a foregone conclusion and the viewer waits for it to happen with foreboding.
The rest of the film is concerned with Houria’s recovery from physical and psychological trauma, aided by her now-caring mom and her best friend Sonia (a wonderfully warm performance by Amira Hilda Douaouda). In addition to offering emotional support to her injured friend, sunny and irrepressible Sonia is made to carry the symbolic weight of the African immigration crisis and the pressing need of young people to break out of a restrictive, no-future society. In these moments the narrative feels contrived, indeed, and the whole film slips out of focus.
Meddour’s screenplay also finds room for a women’s support group composed of deaf and mute women whose terrible life stories have left them on the margins of society. Houria reveals unsuspected leadership abilities when she organizes them into a dance class. As unlikely as this is, it gives the film two of its best scenes: one the healing of a woman’s old psychological trauma in a river, the other an intense modern dance sequence in which composers Maxence Dussére and Yasmine Meddour pull out the stops and Khoudri releases her pent-up anger on behalf of abused womankind. These well-directed sequences corral the theme of overflowing female emotion in ways that reach the audience, as other, more conventional scenes do not.
Director, screenplay: Mounia Meddour
Cast: Lyna Khoudri, Rachida Brakni, Amira Hilda Douaouda, Marwan Fares
Producers: Patrick André, Xavier Gens, Gregoire Gensollen
Cinematography: Léo Lefèvre
Editing: Damien Keyeux
Production design: Chloé Cambournac
Costume design: Emmanuelle Youchnovski
Music: Maxence Dussére, Yasmine Meddour
Production companies: The Ink Connection (France), High Sea Production (France), France 2 Cinema, Scope Pictures (Belgium)
World Sales: Wild Bunch International
Venue: Cairo Film Festival (Horizons of Arab Cinema)
In French, Arabic
104 minutes
