THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
April 22, 2012. On leaving the Open Bar, an establishment frequented by homosexuals from Liège, Ihsane Jarfi, a young man of 32, gets into a car occupied by four people. Two weeks later, his lifeless body will be found in a field, naked, broken from blows, suffering from multiple fractures. He was robbed, tortured, raped, and finally murdered after being abandoned and dying for hours. Two years later, his assailants were tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for three of them, on the grounds of homophobic murder.
You had to have heart in your stomach to seize this affair in the form of a fictional reconstruction. We know that the cinema, for better or for worse, is not lacking. It was a local who took it over in the person of Brussels Nabil Ben Yadir. The man is no longer a stranger. He signed in 2010 The Barons, a bittersweet comedy about young Belgian idlers from North African immigration. Then The Walk, in 2013, which evokes in a romantic way the March for equality and against racism which crossed France in 1983.
After a thriller not distributed in France (Blind spot, 2017), this lover of a cinema strongly attached to the social question signs, with animals, a problematic film, divided into three distinct parts. The first and third are remarkable, the second stuck. We explain. Opening on a family celebration, filmed in a fluid way in long sequence shots, in a warm house where the young Brahim (Ihsane, interpreted by Soufiane Chilah) finds himself gradually worried by a rumor which circulates about the possible revelation of his homosexuality , a taboo family subject. At the end of his tether, unable to reach his boyfriend, he leaves the party to look for him, goes to a gay bar in the city and is soon boarded on his way out in a car occupied by four young people in search of thrills .
A certain naivety
Here opens the second part, which will go crescendo in horror for about thirty minutes. Unease sets in straight away, while in the passenger compartment of the vehicle, Brahim is insulted, humiliated, then beaten once the thugs have obtained the confession of his homosexuality. After an attempt to escape, he is caught, locked naked in the trunk, then led to a field, where the four executioners will compete in sadism and go after him. As we get into the rough, the film has changed format, supposedly filmed by the attackers with their cellphones in a sequence worthy of a snuff movie.
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