love put to the (harsh) test of religious radicalization

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT

In mid-1990s Berlin, medical student Asli (Canan Kir) falls in love with aspiring airline pilot Saeed (Roger Azar) at a student party. She is of Turkish origin, he of Lebanese nationality, and their union first comes up against family pressures. Once married, the young woman notices disturbing signs in her spouse, those of religious radicalization that will put their relationship to the test.

The third feature film by the German Anne Zohra Berrached (Two mothers, 2013) retraces, over a period of five years, an exclusive love breaking at the turn of the XXI^e century and the repolarization of ideologies. Two perspectives are offered to the director. The first and most convincing is that of the simple bluette, chronicle of hearts which fall in love and bodies which set ablaze, carried by a lexicon on edge (camera shaken) and candid poetry (the camera flying away in the air with the lovers). The second is that of the subject of society which overflows the romance by the gang, to the point of completely suffocating it: the inter-community tensions raised by the love in question, and especially the horizon of September 11 which captures the story at the end. race, on the occasion of a questionable turnaround.

If it goes without saying that love makes blind (the film has no other moral), was the point of view of the woman in love the best to account for the beginnings of a radicalized century? What’s left indeed suffers to tie up to a heroine, admittedly admirably interpreted, but who will know nothing of the actions of her husband, striving to believe in him through thick and thin. The reasons for this will therefore remain, if not unknown, at least unclear. Busy describing blindness, the film deliberately goes short-sighted and misses its subject.