It would have been hard for Moon, the sophomore feature of Kurdish, Vienna-based director Kurdwin Ayub, to top Sonne, her feature debut of two years ago, which won the First Feature Award at the Berlinale for its multi-layered, vibrant depiction of a teenager’s life in the Kurdish community in Austria, brimming with irreverent humour and anchored by complex reflections on second-generation immigrant identity. Moon, which premiered in the international competition at the Locarno Film Festival and is screening in Sarajevo Film Festival’s In Focus programme, is equally riveting due to its unpredictable, genre-leaning suspense thriller format, but it is a more sensationalist and superficial take on family pressures, displacement, and self-actualisation, with few of the cultural nuances and detail that made her debut so rich. Moon does not keep us long in Europe, in its story about patriarchal abuses in a powerful, corrupt Arab family in Jordan, and the Austrian personal trainer who becomes a reluctant witness to them. Ulrich Seidl is again attached as a producer, with the film sharing shades of his propensity for shock and the extreme margins of human behaviour.
Many years as a competitive mixed martial arts fighter are coming to an end for Sarah, who is no longer at her prime in the ring. She is feeling lost, especially as her more conventionally family-oriented sister has no qualms in picking apart her lack of steady income as she attempts to diversify into a career as a freelance trainer. Performance artist and trained martial arts fighter Florentina Holzinger is an excellent and credible casting choice as Sarah, whose brittle vulnerability hides behind no-nonsense, dry wit and tough physicality. Amid tension and dead ends at home, Sarah takes a leap of faith and, after a cursory but genial Zoom call with a wealthy young man in Jordan who placed an ad, and tells her MMA is the latest trend there, agrees to fly out for a role as personal trainer for his three sisters. The set-up puts us immediately on alert that Sarah’s impulsive trip abroad, with scant background research done or safeguards in place, may go pear-shaped fast, and Ayub deftly toys with these expectations, switching between setting us on threatened edge and reassuring us.
Touching down in Jordan, Sarah lands in a cloistered bubble, where she is ferried between her luxury hotel and the extravagant villa out of town where she is to give her training sessions by a personal driver who seems to double as a minder. She is at first taken aback, and, compounded by more than a little culture shock, does not know quite what to make of the teenage sisters Shaima (Nagham Abu Baker), Fatima (Celina Antwan), and Nour (Andria Tayeh), or their expectations of her. Cut off from the outside world, aside from supervised visits to an airless shopping mall, homeschooled and prohibited from internet access, the girls spend most of their time shut up inside. Their moods lurch wildly between curious, mischievous, irritable and listless — with minimal commitment to the prospect of a training routine. As their parents are living in Qatar, their brother (who hired Sarah) is effectively in charge. Effusive and accommodating at first, he nevertheless presses Sarah to sign a non-disclosure agreement — and exactly what this family, notorious in the city, has to hide will be Sarah’s shocking discovery. The hotel bar, with its sympathetic but cagey local bartender, becomes the sole outlet for Sarah to unwind and seek guidance for her building distress, but it is a spot that caters cynically with a double standard of morality to tourists for economic gain, without engendering any sincere trust, and as Sarah’s situation spins out of control, it becomes less a haven than another set of eyes for surveillance.
Revelations are brought to a head after Nour, the most rebellious of the three sisters, borrows Sarah’s phone to film a message. Without giving away a key spoiler and dramatic twists (one bombshell event is particularly egregious in its framing of an extreme act of sacrifice or defiance), Moon is revealed to be a horror story of human rights abuse, abduction and imprisonment reminiscent of the plight of Dubai’s captive Princess Latifa, which gripped the western news media in recent years. There is an uncomfortable sense that, while such documented cases of familial control are all too numerous, the film plays up a little too much to reductive, fear-based and exoticised stereotypes of the Arab world as home to treacherous enclaves of limitless wealth and unchecked patriarchal power, particularly when a potential white saviour figure, as rudderless and conflicted as Sarah may be, is added to the mix as the embodiment of a tangible way out for the sisters.
Director, Screenwriter: Kurdwin Ayub
Cast: Florentina Holzinger, Andria Tayeh, Celina Antwan, Nagham Abu Baker
Producers: Ulrich Seidl
Cinematographer: Klemens Hufnagl
Editing: Roland Stöttinger
Sound: David Almeida- Ribeiro
Production company: Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion
Sales: Bendita Film Sales
Venue: Locarno (Concorso Internationale)
In English, Arabic, German
92 minutes
