In
Tunisia, "La saison des hommes"
is the name given to the period when men who work away
from home return to visit their wives. Aicha (Rabiaa Ben
Abdallah) married Said (Ezzedine Gennoun) when she was
18. Said works for eleven months of the year in Tunisia
and, as Islamic custom dictates, Aicha submits to his
mother's authority at home in Djerba. It's within the
enclosed community of women that director Moufada Tlatli
sets the follow-up to her well-received, commercially
successful debut, Les Silences Du Palais (The
Silences of the Palace, 1993). "Djerba is a closed
world, as the palace was in my first film" explains Tlatli.
When Aicha tells Said she wants
to leave Djerba and accompany him to Tunis, Said makes
it a condition that she bear him a son. Over the years,
she bears two daughters, Meriem (Ghalia Ben Ali) and Emna
(Hend Sabri), who grow up in the suffocating world of
Djerba. When Aicha gives birth to a boy, Aziz, he seems
to inherit his mother's neuroses. With the family having
moved to Tunis, it is revealed that Aziz is autistic,
and Said blames his wife for the boy's condition. Her
life becoming unbearable, Aicha now wants to return to
Djerba. She does so and, with her family around her, rebuilds
their life.
"When my daughter was growing up she would ask me a
lot of questions," says Tlatli. "It was her doubts that
led me to write La Saison Des Hommes as
a way of telling the parallel stories of two generations.
This film is for her. It's my take on the girls of today
and what they have to say is going to cause trouble
in Tunisia what seems banal to Westerners is
often very daring back home for us."
She
adds that she spoke to young University students between
the ages of 18 and 24 and was "astonished at their conservatism,
their frozen mentality. The girls keep silent. The boys
have flings with girls but will still only marry virgins.
The taboo of virginity weighs heavy."
While
she acknowledges that Tunisia, her place of birth, is
"a model for the emancipation of women" among Arab countries,
Tlatli also firmly states that
"14 centuries' worth of taboos don't get washed away
in one generation." La Saison Des Hommes
is an account of the two generations beginning that
process.
Jonathan
Holland
