ShareThisThe history of cinema is the history of men gazing at women. Male movie critics (most notably Roger Ebert and Richard Corliss) and female academics (such as feminist professor Judith Mayne) have made this point, saying women are constantly viewed from male-oriented angles, scripts and directions. Russ Meyer's sexploitation films are an obvious example, as is Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," but there are scores of exceptions to the rule, including the new film "The Wedding Song," which shows women in a way never previously depicted onscreen, says French director Karin Albou.
The scene in question: A young woman preparing for her wedding day in 1940s Tunisia has her pubic hair removed in a painful epilation. During the long hot-wax procedure -- a tradition imposed on her -- the teen-ager clings to her girlfriend for comfort, bringing the two closer together at a time when both are on the cusp of full-fledged adulthood.
"The wax scene is something that has never been shown in a movie before," says Albou. " 'The Wedding Song' is a chance to offer the audience a new look at what is femininity."
That "look" is not just outward but inward, says Albou, whose drama centers on a young Jewish woman named Myriam (Lizzie Brochere) and a young Arab woman named Nour (Olympe Borval) who try to navigate their country's 1942 occupation by Nazi troops. The teen-agers' contrasting backgrounds also get in the way: Nour's father is a devout Muslim who keeps her from going to school, while Myriam's mother (played by Albou) is also controlling, but in the realm of suitors: She has her daughter marry an older man (Simon Abkarian) as a way to rescue the family from Germany's Jewish taxation. Myriam and Nour -- friends from childhood -- look at each other's lives with a mixture of envy, curiosity and (occasionally) repellence.
Albou, who's Jewish, grew up in France, but her family's roots are in Algeria, and she lived for a brief time in Tunisia. She researched the history of Jews and Muslims in North Africa, and says the teen-agers' basic story in "The Wedding Song" is based on recollections of older North Africans she spoke with, and her desire to show that the religions can co-exist during war. Albou, who has Muslim friends, got the idea for "The Wedding Song" after reading the papers of her paternal grandfather, who was a German prisoner of war. During her research, Albou discovered that, during World War II, France stripped French citizenship from its Jewish citizens in Algeria.
"The Wedding Song" moves the setting to Tunisia and imagines what it was like for such war-torn Jews and their Muslim neighbors. Both Muslim and Jewish audiences have praised the movie. After a screening this month in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, an Albanian Muslim woman told Albou that she "recognized herself in the characters -- that it's a message of peace," Albou says. "Some people have said the film is too romantic -- that it (the relationship between Jewish and Muslim friends) can't exist."
Albou's first film, "Little Jerusalem," also dramatizes the relationship between two young women -- Jewish sisters on the outskirts of Paris who were raised in an Orthodox setting. One sister has an affair with a Muslim man; the other tries to reconcile with her ultrareligious husband. A reviewer for Variety magazine has said that Albou is "preoccupied" with themes of female sexuality -- to which Albou answers, "Yes, I am. I am preoccupied with community, and sexuality is a part of community."
In Tunisia, where "The Wedding Song" was made, Albou had trouble casting the part of Nour because of the sex scenes in the script. All the teen-age actresses Albou approached backed out because the character was required to, in front of a camera, repeatedly kiss a teen-age boy and take off her clothes. Albou ended up casting Borval, a first-time actress from France, as Nour. With both Borval and Brochere, Albou forged a strong relationship because -- besides directing them -- she acted with them. "Acting," Albou says, "is another kind of communication. It's intimate. Suddenly, I'm with them at the same level, having an emotional dialogue with them."
As a director and an actress working on her own projects, Albou, 41, is living a kind of dream life -- one that would have thrilled her paternal grandmother, Germaine Albou, who was raised in eastern Algeria, and had been tapped to act in a film 60 years ago. The film, which had her portraying an Egyptian, was canceled by World War II, ending her career before it started. The grandmother died when Albou was in her 20s and had just completed film school. Albou says their bond -- a deep friendship between women of different generations -- "encouraged me a lot," and helped transform her into the filmmaker she is today.
(E-mail Jonathan Curiel at jcuriel(at)sfchronicle.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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