THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
What we like about Baya Kasmi is her inner side. We remember the screenplay she co-signed with Michel Leclerc, for Name of people (2010), in which a certain Bahia Benmahmoud (Sara Forestier), a radical left-wing activist, sleeps with all the right-wing men who cross her path to convert them to the values of the equitable sharing of wealth. Until the day she meets Arthur Martin (Jacques Gamblin), a cautious obsessive whom she takes for a fascist, but who turns out to be a socialist as discreet about his Jewish origins as she highlights his Arab origins.
She returns today as a director, still co-writing with Michel Leclerc, to portray a southern family of North African origin, with a blasphemous humor that would rather come from Philip Roth or Woody Allen. It all starts with Youssef Salem (Ramzy Bedia), forty-something who draws inspiration from his own childhood and his own family to write an explosive novel on the repression of sex and the hypocrisy of behaviors touching on this sensitive issue, vis-à-vis against which the current family policy is to close our eyes and keep up appearances. Entitled The Toxic Shockthe work refers to the legend which threatened, in Algeria, lovers who committed the act outside the means of marriage, struck as they were, from then on, by a sort of fatal thunderbolt.
Exuberant editor
The novel, whose film “reconstructs” scenes that sometimes go as far as phantasmagoria, actually unpacks part of the life of the Salems: hidden homosexuality of the sister who lives with a girl whom she presents to her family as her roommate, strange mores of the father who cross-dresses in his spare time, the start of a romance between the mother and the lifeguard… Not to mention Youssef, whom we see again as an obsessed teenager, masturbating in the swimming pool while ogling the girls, before seeing his mother there and dreading having gotten her pregnant! Having become an adult, the same, in order not to worry his parents as much as to have peace, makes them believe that he is about to marry, in Paris, a woman who left him two years earlier.
Everything becomes complicated when, appearing in a somewhat rowdy literary program in which he must fight against a Muslim indigenous woman and a far-right henchman, Youssef sees, thanks to social networks, his reputation take off, and soon the Goncourt prize will be awarded. interest in him. If this delights his exuberant editor (Noémie Lvovsky), who also has explicitly carnal views on her foal, Youssef, meanwhile, spends his time on the sets denying the autobiographical nature of his novel and hiding from his parents, as much as possible, even if it means smashing their television set, its rising glory. While his brothers and sisters, whose youngest has returned to a rigorous Islam, want to kill him, everything is going well, with insolence and alacrity, unashamedly lighting the fires of imagination and possibilities.
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