A tense emotional bloodletting, “A Son (Un Fils)” opens on a deceptively peaceful tone. A group of younger, middle-aged men and women have gathered for a picnic, perhaps for a celebration. They gather in a beautiful place under a canopy, talk and raise glasses, laugh and drink freely while children play nearby. And while the location is unclear, when the picnickers speak Arabic with a little French, the geographic options narrow. The smile keeps coming, even if one reveler jokes about an imam and another says they’ll laugh less if the Islamists take over.
Set in the summer of 2011, ‘A Son’ is set in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution, although it is never directly involved in the upheaval. (In January of that year, the authoritarian president fled the country after mass protests, leading to the formation of a new government.) Instead, writer-director Mehdi M. Barsaoui takes a skewed approach to the country’s unrest. Without waving flags or making explicit politics, he emphasizes faces and feelings and specifically what happens when one of the families has the picnic – this joyous gathering, with its laughter and bare heads, contemporary clothing and ties to the modern world – blunders in a violent Islamic ambush.
Fares (Sami Bouajila) and Meriem (Najla Ben Abdallah), a sexy, attractive and affectionate couple, are first spotted driving a Range Rover to the picnic. Sometime later, she and their 11-year-old son Aziz (Youssef Khemiri) hit the road again, this time heading south on a business trip to Fares. Their destination is Tataouine, a location bordered by desert and a few hours from Libya, and then in the middle of a civil war. There, the family checks into a luxury hotel and you wait for the worst.
It arrives shortly after with narrative economy, gunfire, and a jolt of visceral terror. One minute the family is singing along to a pop tune; the twinkling of an eye, Fares is racing backwards down the road with shattered windows and a badly injured Aziz, and you abruptly watch another movie. Fares and Meriem rush him to a hospital, where Barsaoui begins to thwart your assumptions about what to expect. And as the tone, atmosphere, and narrative shifts and shifts—the film alternates between hospital drama, wedding melodrama, black market intrigue—Meriem and, above all, Fares, pull you closer, push you away, and ask you for a side to choose.
Barsaoui folds many narrative twists into the compressed time frame and cramped spaces of the main location, the dilapidated regional hospital where Fares and Meriem wait anxiously as doctors treat Aziz. While the focus remains on the parents, their haunted faces and blood-soaked clothes, Barsaoui circles the rest of the hospital, where watchful women in headscarves also wait. The silence of these other visitors – some accompanied, others alone – becomes more meaningful as the relationship between Fares and Meriem is tested and their voices grow louder and angrier. What, Barsaoui seems to ask, do these other women think, hope and want – emissaries from another Tunisia that Fares and Meriem share but do not inhabit?
What Barsaoui wants is for you to notice these women and see the way they look at this couple, who rarely return their gaze, a blinder that is understandable but also revealing. If this were some kind of European art film, Fares and Meriem might be punished for living in a bourgeois, secular echo chamber. But Barsaoui doesn’t brutalize his characters, even when he shows them (and you) the depths of human depravity. Their child may be dying and their marriage may be too, and that’s pain enough. But there is more to life than your own grief, as Barsaoui underscores with another child, an unloved boy who comes in late and brings the horrors of the greater world.
A Son (Un Fils)
Not judged. In French and Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters.