This protective physical ease contrasts with his parents’ volatile relationship, in which mutually desired sex is often a precursor to his father beating his mother (Malika El Hamaoui).Ĭohabitation within this charged atmosphere is made more electric by Abdellah’s erotic longing for Slimane meanwhile, the teen has his first sexual encounters with men. His father has one bedroom, his older brother Slimane (Amine Ennaji) another, and the third is a burrow-like space where the warmth of his mother’s body, alongside his other siblings, provides a cocoon of reassuring intimacy.
Young Abdellah (Said Mrini), 15, lives with his parents, five sisters and two brothers in a working-class district of Casablanca. Transitioning his story to the screen, Taia retains the bare bones but strips away warmth and insight, without any fresh perceptions that would compensate. Taia’s largely autobiographical book, however, was a bold coming out, unadorned by guilt or sensationalism and directly confronting Western expectations, at least in gay circles, of Arab youth as adornments rather than equal companions. While positive gay Arab protags are something of a cinematic novelty, “Salvation Army” isn’t the first to center around such a character, contrary to recent reports (Maher Sabry’s “All My Life” and Samer Daboul’s “Out Loud” are but two earlier examples). Queer fests and a small Francophone release will muster some attention. Where the book delivered a straightforward, beautifully told story of a gay man negotiating family, desire and the sexual power play behind Arab-European intimacy, the pic largely jettisons the first-person narrative that allowed access to the protag’s head, replacing it with distancing coldness not helped by emotionless perfs. Young Moroccan scribe Abdellah Taia moves into the director’s seat with the screen version of his autobiographical novel “ Salvation Army,” losing much of the texture in translation from pen to camera.
0 kommentar(er)
