Houcem Slouli | Désir conditionnel (Conditional Desire) / 2023

riddle of desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Houcem Slouli (screenwriter and director) Désir conditionnel (Conditional Desire) / 2023 [15 minutes]

 

What we don’t know at the beginning of Tunisian director Houcem Slouli’s short film of 2023 is gradually revealed without dialogue. Ahmed (Slim Dhib) and Salma (Imene Ghazouani), newly married, live in a life of seeming entrapment. They have almost regulatory sex, but sit with quiet impatience with one another most of the rest of the time.

     Salma’s life seems particularly defined by entrapment. Both characters are shown behind banisters which create bars, but Salma is particularly in a state of stasis, pots boiling over as she swallows chocolate bars and forlornly finger-spoons melted chocolate into her mouth, as if she were desperately trying to salve what she is missing in her life. At one point, the camera catches the decorative bars across a window while at the same moment portraying our heroine upside down in the mirror, hinting at both how her world has shifted her life and entrapped her simultaneously.

     There are no arguments. They have what might be described as dutiful sex before Ahmed rises and goes to the coffee-shop which he apparently owns and operates by himself.

      But gradually, we get glimpses of Ahmed in bed with a man, Cherif (Ghassen Trabelsi).

      Although the married couple sit calmly entrenched in the relationship in the house, their comings and goings on the staircase are noted, at one point, comically, their motions further entrapping each other as she forces him back toward their apartment while he pushes her to retreat back down the staircase.

   Their only conversation with each other consists of two central questions preceded by the statement: “The situation weighs on us.”

    Then, in a “face-off” in which they stare off in different directions:

              Salma: “Why did you say yes?”                   Ahmed: “Why didn’t you say no?”

       Soon after we see Salma with her own same-sex partner, Feriel (Aicha Azzouz) as two giggle together in bed.

       We perceive, in other words, that in the restricted society in which they live, both have chosen a marriage with the other to hide their own queer passions from others. But family has already interceded. Ahmed’s mother wants to know when she might expect them for dinner. Salma’s sister advises her that it is time for her to have a baby. And meanwhile, the very presence of the other puts restrictions of their sexual lives that they obviously did not previously experience.

       Slouli’s work never preaches, and, in fact, says absolutely nothing about their “other” desires and relationships, but in their empty stares, their own formulaic sex we sense their frustrations and impatience.

       Again, these are not exaggerated expressions. One might almost suggest that there is an almost Kabuki like aspect to Slouli’s work, the slightest gesture representing a world of significance making clear that although they have chosen the form of their imprisonment it is prison nonetheless.

       Whether they can maintain the charade, fitting the pieces of their passions into their relationship, or if they might actually grow to love one another as friends is not answered in Slouli’s riddle of how desire can become conditional.

       This film is a truly profound gem about a culture in which the personal sexual desires of individuals are so restricted that he chokes off nearly all joy and life. That these two have, at least, sought out some sort of compromise speaks to their bravery, given the suffering they still must endure.

 

Los Angeles, January 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).