THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Throughout, we do not believe his eyes. What is this brutality that we had lost the habit of seeing in the cinema? This way of rushing headlong into the crux of a situation to the point that it comes out in an aberrant light. This harsh and fierce humor of the lowlands which does not bother with any precaution. Wherever you look at it, it is with something stubbornly new that feathers presents itself to us, after its passage through Cannes and Critics’ Week, in July 2021.
Where young international auteur cinema is often overwhelmed by references, this pointing, irretrievable object seems to invent in its own corner a language of its own, abrupt and uppercut. Coming from Egypt, it is the work of a young director, Omar El Zohairy, born in 1988, who produced his first feature film there, after two short films that earned him to become Yousry Nasrallah’s assistant (Cairo Women, in 2009, The Stream, the green meadow and the sweet face, in 2016), a figure in national cinema.
Decrepit social world
feathers is a scathing fable about everyday misery, categorically refusing to look at it with a saddened look or steeped in bad social conscience. On the contrary, there reigns here a kind of furious drollery or “funny” fury – in the primary sense of strange, bizarre – which is not unrelated to the Luis Buñuel of land without bread (1933) or Los Olvidados (1950). In a factory estate, a mother watches with stubborn deference over her worker husband and their three children, including an infant.
Instead of the expected misery, “Feathers” substitutes a form of incongruity, an indication of an impossible condition, that of the underclass, to which is added that of a woman without resources.
During the eldest’s birthday party, a clumsy magician performs a crappy trick, during which the husband, engulfed in a trunk, disappears, replaced by a hen. Has he transformed? Nothing says it, but everything suggests it for the guests, as for the poor housewife who finds herself alone, her toddlers on her arms, and, in place of the man on whose favor the surrounding society is built, this stupid gallinaceous as cabbage who can’t take it, and is no longer enough to pocket the salary of the month.
And if the former boss of her husband offers her his protection, it is not without waiting in exchange for a return “in kind”. Then begins for her a real obstacle course, where the slightest penny is counted. If it takes place largely in the decor of the family apartment, the eye of the cyclone invaded at fixed times by factory smoke and whose filthy walls cover an almost abstract dimension, feathers also ventures outside, opening onto an equally decrepit social world, an empire of rust and calamine that seems on the way to desertification, as if the result of who knows what catastrophe.
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