his
last night in the closet
by Douglas Messerli
Shariff Nasr, Philip
Delmaar, Fahd Larhzaoui, Tofik Dibi, and Sahil Amar Aissa (screenplay), Shariff
Nasr (director) El Houb (The Love) / 2022
About a week and half
ago I posted an essay on a short film, Stille Dorst
(High Tide), by Dutch director Claire Zhou about a Dutch-Morocco man who
has left his wife and comes out as gay, an incident which she explained was
based on the fact that so many Moroccan married men spent secret time outside
their marriages in gay activities.
And now I have just seen a truly powerful
film directed by Shariff Nasr which confirms and more fully describes just that
problem, El Houb (The Love), which I watched as part of the
NewFest (The New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Film Festival), a
work which all critics and publicists described as a “brutal” and “serious,”
but which also looks at the issue with some “funny” or “hilarious” results.
Let me begin my making it absolutely
clear, although the work is mostly serious, it is actually a not only a
hysterically funny drama but close to being psychologically hysterical in its
presentation the central character’s—Karim Zahwani (performed by actor Fahd
Larhzaoui, whose own life is said to the source of much of the script)—experiences
in an operatic-like melodrama played out in a grand, histrionic manner that
only such a man and his family, fictional or real deserve.
Like so many of his friends, Karim
obviously has homosexual tendencies, although also like his friends he has
attempted to drown them out and hide them with relationships with women, in
Karim’s case a young Dutch girl, Eline (Britte Lagcher); and like several of
his friends with such contradictory and haram desires he gathers in the
gay bars to play homoerotic games such as participating in “underwear nights,”
or becoming so drunk that he can’t remember the gay encounters he has, or at
least permits himself to forget and not be responsible for what happens.
On just such a night, so very intoxicated
that he can no longer remain standing, he meets a young engaging Ghanaian man,
Kofi (Emmanuel Boafo) who literally takes him home to assure his health, but of
course because he is also attracted to this grown man who still behaves as if
he were an immigrant boy.
Indeed, Karim is what you might describe
as a fairly well-to-do Dutch businessman, of man now of burgerij behoorde,
the burgher class, and representing such a figure, as well as because of his
family and extended community of Moroccan friends, he demands each time he
meets for sex at Kofi’s apartment that he close the curtains, even though the
apartment appears to be a high rise and the curtains are transparent. Observed
one night with Kofi by some of his friends, he
immediately turns away
from his companion, causing a further split between the two, as Karim’s
paranoia becomes more and more rampant.
When they finally return to a more
serious relationship, Karim, getting up the nerve to invite him to his glorious
high rise suite of rooms, for one of the first times in this early part of the
movie seems to truly be enjoying their relationship; a knock at the door,
however, turns out to be his father, Abbas (Slimane Dazi) who witnesses, in one
of the first moments of the exaggerated farce the rest of the movie features,
the two men rising from their shared bed naked.
Something clearly needs to be done. And,
although Kofi advises against it, and any level-headed man of middle age who
has kept the secret for such a very long time and for very good reasons would
perceive it is no longer necessary or even possible, Karin determines to have
it out with his family, coming out at a time when generally it no longer has
any significance.
And yes, this is a “coming out” story
presented in such a highly theatrical manner that he might have as well entered
in media res a Ronald Tavel or Charles Ludlam play of the Theatre of the
Ridiculous.
Karim does not just enter his family
apartment, which might almost be described as part of a compound of their
Moroccan-born neighbors, but when his father and mother, in their horror of
what he is about to tell them pretend that he is not even there, he enters the
closet into which as a child he often escaped. Literally, he returns to the
metaphorical “closet” in which his life has never left. The closet, moreover is
not simply the LGBTQ standard world, but a place a great power, since within
are the controls to the family’s water supply and electricity, which he turns
off in order to gain their attention. Ironically, in doing that he also denies
them the elements of communion, food (bread) and water (wine).
Moreover, this particular closet
features a small grilled window, serving not only as a gay hiding space, but a
confessional box, from which he will serve with his family members,
particularly his mother Fatima (Lubna Azabal) and jobless and drug-addicted
brother Redouan (Sabri Saddik) the role of priest, he listening to their
confessions, while they are forced to respond the questions with which he
challenges them.
In short, the grown man Karim has
infantilized himself again, or perhaps has never been able to be anything else
in this absurd clan where truth must not ever be spoken.
Strangely, over the long two days and
night he spends within, things do get spoken and indeed do happen. Much of what
occurs is from the outside as a result to the gossip-prone community around
them, who observing that the family’s electricity and water has been turned
off, presume they are in dire financial need, and throughout the rest of the
film trot in an out with various dishes of food and packages of money, one of
which the local Iman himself has sent when Abbas begins a telephone call to him,
but stops in the midst of making the call as Karim reminds him of what happened
to his cousin Soufian (Nasrdin Dchar) when the Inman was called in just such a
circumstance.
Soufian, a close friend to Karim had
also come to accept his homosexuality and could no longer play the good husband
to his wife. But through the intrusions of the Iman and others, eventually
committed suicide. He, in turn, becomes one of the ghosts that haunt Karim’s
closet along with his younger self (Shad Issa) who often seems wiser than the
man he has become.
Gradually, as the family members,
despite their fierce pretense to ignore him, pass by the closet doorway, communicate
with their locked-up son. Fatima, despite her anger, brings food and blankets
for the night ahead, Redouan in an attempt to understand why his brother has
returned to such childish ways, and even Abbas who although he refuses to speak
directly to the walled-off son, overhears the others’ conversations.
Strangely and frustratingly for gay men
in the audience, Karim makes no pronouncements during his long internment, and
doesn’t attempt to explain or justify his behavior, but simply asks questions
that reveal an amazingly complex childhood in which the constantly demanding
mother is gradually revealed to have had a childhood lover whom her parents
would not accept. She evidently had a brilliant career before her as a doctor,
but in the man her parents selected, Abbas, she gave it all up for his less
financially successful form of employment, which explains their current
middle-class if comfortable living space.
When Redouan challenges Karim, the
problem is gradually revealed, but the second son who could never live up to
the expectations that Karim had set is far from sympathetic, like his parents
but more bellicosely calling him a “queer,” “faggot,” and whatever other
derogatory term exists in his undeveloped vocabulary.
The ghost of Soufian visits Karim to
remind him that he did nothing to support him in his time of greatest need. And
the childhood version of Karim makes it clear that he cannot comprehend the
grown man’s current hysteria, although glimpses of the boy growing up give
provide us with some glimpses of the familial exaggerations that he is now
performing.
At one delightful point, the child lays
on the floor in the foreground watching Dutch television with Abbas and Fatima
sitting on the couch behind sharing a box of popcorn. Suddenly on the screen two
young boys appear, look at one another, and kiss (something that probably could
only have occurred on Netherlands Television), the parents in the background
tossing up the popcorn into the air as in slow motion they both seek out the TV
control to change the station.
And despite Fatima’s seeming obedience
of all her religious and cultural traditions, having quite apparently given up
her own happiness and intellectual abilities in the process, the child still
reminds Karim of how at a wedding party, she quite forcibly changed the
traditions by demanding the men leave the hidden “men’s corner” and come join
the others for their photographs. She could have made changes if she’d wanted,
and Karim and his younger self, moreover, accuse her of knowing of his
sexuality but of doing nothing to help him or release him from guilt.
In one beautiful scene the young Karim
dances with another boy until Fatima intrudes, pushing his friend away to stand
a young girl before him, insisting that he dance with her instead.
In
the kitchen, meanwhile, the dirty dishes pile up, and tempers flare. Despite
the donations of food at the door and the gift of a full lamb from the local
butcher, no one of the family members want to eat.
Abbas calls in Aline, who sits, like the
others, outside the door to ask Karim what is going on. Karim says
little, only half-explaining the situation by suggesting that if there ever was
a woman who might have helped him it would have been her. But even that
elliptical phrase makes the situation quite clear to her and she furiously
stands, outraged having discovered about her lover’s sexuality in such a
ridiculous manner.
Despite the incident, Fatima still
imagines that he might make a go of it with her; when he incredulously asks
her, “Didn’t you see what just happened,” her answer is simply “we’ll find
another one.
The neighbors also grow more and more
inquisitive, one of the nosiest of them daring even to enter the house before
they manage to send him on his way. But even worse is the fact that they have
spotted a black man, obviously Kofi, sitting on a bench nearby; and they are
nervous, perhaps ready to call the police. Karim’s expensive new car, parked
outside the complex, has already been impounded by the cops.
At one point when Redouan returns the
second day, he reports a gift from his brother’s lover, evidently a kind of
snow-cone, and he now has Karim’s cell-phone so that when Kofi calls he is
about to tell him that him lies, endangering Kofi’s own life. For the first
time Karim attempts to break out of the closet, while Redouan firmly holds him
in. This community appears to have no respect for outsiders or those they have
rejected, as the memories of burial of Soufian and the hypocritical lies of
those tossing sandy soil into his grave repeat in Karim’s haunted memories.
Finally, Fatima arrives with a pliers,
forces open the door and turns back on the electricity and water power, leaving
her son again in wonderment of what she could have altered in both their past
and present if she had only dared to. But now she is bitter, hateful,
describing the son who, she whispered on one of her passes before the
confession, she would always love, as himself being haram.
Karim has little choice now but leave his
closet forever, but as he attempts yet again to communicate with his family,
now eating at the table, they again pretend he does not exist refusing to even
acknowledge his presence.
Furious, Karim begins to pick up vases,
furniture, even the TV set all of which he has bought for them and break them
into pieces as he tosses them across the room, yelling “homo vase,” “homo
chair,” “homo TV,” etc. He gets a can of read spray paint and paints the words
“Karim Is Homo” across the living room wall.
There is nothing left for him to do. Not
only has he truly come out of the closet but he has openly declared his
identity. He turns to leave, Fatima screaming out her anger and demanding her
husband, who sits with his hands to his head in near despair, do something!
Finally, Abbas stands, goes over to Karim
and pulls him slowly back to the table, asking him to sit down, as the family
continues their meal, the windows are wide open to reveal them at dinner
together to the entire neighborhood.
The mix of the ridiculous and the
profundity of tears and love that absurd behavior has obscured for their entire
lives has seldom so fully been allowed to enter the domain of cinema. Nasr’s
film permits the whole world to enter into what had once been hidden and
closed.
Even grown men must at some point “come
out” of the darkness in which they have spent their lives in a fearful crouch.
In this case, tears streamed down my face.
Los Angeles, October 22,
2022
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (October 2022).
