You Resem­ble Me

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.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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