What do you do when you don’t see people like you represented in French literature? Well, if you are Fatima Daas, you write a character that has never been shown before — a lesbian, Muslim young woman, first generation French daughter of Algerian immigrants. And then, a great filmmaker and actress like Hafsia Herzi might make it into a film that ends up in Cannes, in Competition. Well, this is what happened.
So all of the above statements are true. Apart from Daas’ name which is a pseudonym, for obvious reasons. Based on Daas’ book The Last One —Herzi’s film title in French is La Petite Dernière, “the last little one” — The Little Sister is a film that needed to be made. Because reconciling religion and sexuality is always a tricky balance and usually, the boat is tipped heavily towards extremism, before any conversations can be had.
The Little Sister, which screens in Competition in Cannes, opens with the author’s namesake alter-ego Fatima’s thorough ablutions before her dawn prayer. The stage is set for a devout Muslim woman, so that we can better understand what is to come. Fatima is a high school senior at first — the film is told in five seasons, from one spring to the spring of the following year — and she has a boyfriend, albeit one she meets in secrecy, up a stairwell. He’s clueless to her inner struggle and talks about getting married and having “a little princess” of a daughter, one who would look like Fatima. Behind the eyes of the wondrous Nadia Melliti, unbelievably a newcomer in her first acting role, we can see the thought wheels of her character Fatima turning and calculating what this prison of love will look like for her. We are not surprised when she pisses the clueless boyfriend off, allowing him to step off and walks away.
But there is also an aggressive streak to Fatima, which comes from her own vulnerability, and she overreacts when a fellow student calls her a lesbian, beating him up beyond what his comment required, breaking his glasses and bringing him to tears. It is this over-the-top kind of strength she displays which leads us to make up our own minds about Fatima’s sexuality. She’s inexperienced, young, and unsure in her own ways, so she goes about trying to find her sexual identity through online dating sites where she calls herself “Linda”. “Where are you from?” The women she encounters, in cars and in bars, ask her. “Egypt,” she replies, not ready yet to give herself, all of herself away completely.
Then one day, because of her asthma, she attends a class for managing the condition and a young Korean nurse touches her heart — literally. Ji-Na puts her hand on Fatima’s chest to point to her lungs, softly, and there is a shock of electricity that we, sitting in the comfy darkness of the screening theater, can feel wholeheartedly — pardon the pun. Park-ji Min plays this petite young woman beautifully and we buy their attraction to each other, so different and yet both so alike in their inner struggles. Ji-Na is the first person to draw a smile from Fatima, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Alas, as any good film story should have, there is a second act to this, one which brings about confusion and sadness, because I imagine — being heterosexual myself — being gay must always feel like a struggle. Actually, let me rephrase that — being in love is always a struggle, and it doesn’t matter what your sexual orientation is. We want the impossible when we fall in love. We should not wish for the moon, as Bette Davis admonishes Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager, when we already have the stars. Right? But we do, we always do, it’s the nature of our heart to yearn to hurt.
Reading a past interview with Fatima Daas, the author of the book the film is based on, I found this paragraph fascinating: “I grew up with the idea, whether in films or in books, that I did not exist,” Daas, 26, said, “I didn’t exist as a young lesbian, Muslim woman, with an immigrant background.” She added “so the question I have asked myself a lot is, ‘How do we shape ourselves when we have absolutely no representation?’”
As a woman who was born in one place and grew up in another thousands of miles away, speaking a different language from my birth one and trying to fit in at all costs, I identify wholeheartedly with Daas’ sentence, even if I don’t share her, or her character’s sexual orientation. I didn’t see a lot of Ninas in films when I was growing up and while characters did resemble me in books, they never shared the important traits or my inner thoughts. The Little Sister gave me goosebumps in some scenes and I imagine the film would do very well in international circuits, packing a punch for the younger generations in particular.
While watching the film, I wrote myself a note to buy the book, as I imagine a story like this needs more than 100 minutes to be told properly. It requires days spent with a character like Fatima, and her inner struggles, plus the repetition of her self affirmations and the discovery of her identity. As a young religious woman, daughter of immigrants and gay, she carries so many burden on her shoulders, it is a wonder she can stand up at all and carry onward.
The Little Sister is shot by Jérémie Attard who worked with Herzi on her 2021 Un Certain Regard title Good Mother. Herzi also wrote the script for the film, based on the book by Daas. It features French-Palestinian-Algerian actress Mouna Soualem, in a small role that packs a huge punch! Somehow her arrival as Cassandra kicks The Little Sister into fourth gear, both for its leading character and as a film.
The film also pulls together an outstanding supporting cast, made up of Fatima’s sisters, both born in Algeria whereas she was only one in her family born in France, her understanding, caring mom who seems to sense her struggles and implies devotion no matter what, and her friends, as well as various dates, of all ages, as she begins to experiment with who she is. So many names, I can’t mention them here. You’ll simply have to watch this beautiful film to find out.
International sales are handled by mk2 Films.
Top image courtesy of the Festival de Cannes, used with permission.