After two young sisters separated from each other in foster care, the eldest struggles to find her place in the world in Dina Amer's affecting drama.
In 2015, Hasna Aït Boulahcen, a young French-Moroccan woman who was radicalised by ISIS, was killed during a raid on an apartment building in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis. The media had a field day with the case of Hasna, who was inaccurately labelled as “Europe’s first female suicide bomber”, with outlets scrambling to paint a sensationalised portrait of a rebellious party girl-turned terrorist. Even when forensic investigations concluded that Hasna did not, in fact, blow herself up, and that the bomber was an unidentifiable man, false stories about her proliferated.
Journalist-turned-filmmaker Dina Amer aims to set the record straight with an attempt to commit Hasna Aït Boulahcen’s life to screen by way of reconstructing her life in order to consider the circumstances that led her to radicalisation. The first half of You Resemble Me is gripping in its neorealistic, social realist approach as it follows a nine year old Hasna and her younger sister Mariam (Lorenza and Ilonna Grimaudo, both giving wholly engrossing performances) dressed in matching pink floral dresses while roaming the streets of Paris, stealing food from market stalls and seeking shelter in the streets as a result of fleeing their physically abusive mother. The unbreakable bond between the two is what anchors this first half, giving Amer the means to depict the hardship, neglect and abuse suffered by those vilified at the hands of a racist French state. The two sisters are eventually separated by child protective services and end up in different foster homes.
We’re then transported to the future, where a twenty-something year old Hasna struggles to hold jobs and unwillingly resorts to sex work and drug dealing for cash. Amer accompanies this time jump with a jarring, surrealist application of a deep-fake visual effect that periodically morphs Mouna Soualem’s face with two other faces – one belonging to the filmmaker herself, and the other to Sabrina Ouazani. Although employed to evoke how this troubled young woman’s identity crisis and fragmented life played a pivotal part in her overwhelming desire to belong, this technique prompts a forceful distance between us and the character, as well as doing a disservice to Soualem’s raw performance.
The care that went into this film shines through, despite depictions of violence that are as incessant as they are laid on thick. Hasna is faced with torrential, heavy-handed amounts of physical, verbal and sexual abuse by unrealistically cruel perpetrators, which is heartbreaking to witness, yet leads to a contrived final product that, for lack of a better description, indulges in trauma porn. A final gear shift in the last ten minutes of the film weaves the overall fictive approach with news reports and conventional interviews which Amer conducted with Hasna’s parents and siblings, which, although necessary and edifying, make for a jarring, tacked-on conclusion.
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Published 10 Feb 2023
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