what doesn’t
get said
by Douglas Messerli
Abdellah Taïa (screenwriter and
director, based on his fiction) L’armée
du salut (Salvation Army) /
2013, USA 2015
Most critics appear to have
perceived Abdellah Taïa’s Salvation Army,
based on his own
autobiographical fiction, as a kind
of “coming of age” movie, an expression of youth similar except in its sexual
orientation and religious and cultural perspectives, as the Out magzine critic suggested, to Richard
Linklater’s Boyhood. In fact, Taia’s
Moroccan-set film could not be more different. Yes, both films do relate their
tales in terms of quietude, forcing the viewer to observe and draw his own
conclusions rather than engage in a verbal dialogue with the characters; and,
yes, both works have a kind of laconic looseness in their narrative structures.
Indeed, for precisely these qualities The
New York Times reviewer, Ben Kenigsberg, found Salvation Army to be “remote,” and “vague.”
But the young Abdellah (Said Mirni) of Taïa’s work, unlike Linklater’s
is quite aware of his sexuality in a country that outlaws gay sexuality while
at the same time closing an eye to the virtual “rape” of young boys by local
shopkeepers, construction workers, and numerous others within the community. To
Americans it may appear as unusual that Abdellah’s father (Ahdelhak Swilah)
seems vaguely aware and accepting of his son’s sexual encounters, going so far
as to invite the child into his own bed, but it is just this sexual
hypocrisy—where at one moment the elder leaves his child alone with a market
grocer so that the two can quickly engage in sex, and the very next moment he
beats Abdellah’s mother (Malika El Hamaoui) after engaging with her in sex—that
tortures the young boy. Indeed, the two are very much interrelated in this
macho-misogynistic society. Nearly everywhere he goes, the fragile boy is
invited by workers to be fucked or to perform fellatio on them, while at the
same time his very life is endangered by a mysterious rock-throwing citizen,
obviously aware of his sexual activities in a community where everyone knows
everyone else.
Abdellah, in fact, can find no privacy in this world. Forced to sleep
with numerous other brothers and sisters, yet scolded by his mother for even
entering his beloved brother Slimane’s (Arnine Ennajji) room—where he fetishizes
the handsome masculinity of his sibling—the young gay man is confused less by
his being taken advantage of (he is, after all, beautiful and weak) than the
pleasure he derives from the acts. Only once, when he approaches a hirsute
construction worker himself and the two actually engage in sensuous love-making
rather than a savage sex act, does he allow himself to smile.
Is it any wonder, accordingly that Abdellah retreats to an inner,
unspoken life, a life in which hardly anything is said and can only be
interpreted by its visual signs: his travels back and forth to the baker who
will bake his mother’s bread, his retreats to his brother’s bed when the
brother is absent, and his intense
moments of brooding wherein, at one point he is even caught by his father
counting the petals of a lover’s flower: “he loves me, he loves me not.” The
details are not as important as the outlines; we never discover who his
would-be lover is.
If you want to call Taïa’s approach, accordingly, remote, so be it. The
very point of his tale is how different the
young Abdellah’s world is from the open (yet in some ways more closed) Western
countries. Linklater’s Mason, despite the difficulties of his youth, lives in a
world somewhat removed, but also innocent, free from the deep complexities of
sexuality and violence; he is given the time and space to sort things out, to
become himself. Taïa’s Abdellah, on the other hand, has been plunged in a confusing
and often cruel world where it is expected that a child might engage in
homosexual activity but where he will be punished if he finds some pleasure in
the act or continues to be sexually homosexual—except in the furtive world of
boy-men relationships—as an adult. In Mason’s world youth is a time in which
one needn’t speak; in Abdellah’s childhood, the important things cannot be said. And the movie has no
choice but to show things often without openly saying and explaining them.
Of central importance in Abdellah’s eventual “freedom” is his
relationship with his brother. When Slimane, still living at home, determines
to take a short vacation to a sea-resort, he is forced to take along the two
younger brothers, Abdellah and the child Mustapha. Even that time with his
much-admired sibling is still a mixed event for Abdellah. First of all, he must
share the time with his little brother; more importantly, he is sent along on
the voyage by the mother to spy on him, and to keep his brother from spending
his money on prostitutes. Giving Abdellah a talisman to protect Slimane, she
hisses, he must remain “ours.”
Mustapha shares Slimane’s bed, while Abdellah is forced to sleep so very
near his would-be lover-protector without a touch. And Abdellah is confused, as
well, by his brother’s disdain for Moroccan and the Arabic language when he
discovers that Slimane is reading a book by the Greek author Kazantzakis in
French. Slimane attempts to explain that the only way to escape the world in
which he clearly feels trapped is to turn to French and European culture, a
realization which Abdellah will eventually come to as well, but with obvious
regrets.
Despite Abdellah’s attempts to keep his brother close, Slimane slips
away with a local waitress and, as Abdellah reports in a phone call home to his
mother, “abandons” his brothers.
What doesn’t get said is that, during the same day, Abdellah also
temporarily abandons Mustapha when he meets up a young man on the beach who is
obviously interested in a sexual encounter.
A few scenes later and 10 years later, moreover, we discover that it is
the grown Abdellah who has escaped his family’s clutches, while Slimane has
remained at home. As we might have expected, Abdellah has become a sexual
partner to a sophisticated Swiss professor, Jean (Frédéric Landenberg). But
although we might be tempted to see this relationship as a movement forward in
the young man’s life, we recognize, through Abdellah’s continued lack of
expression and, particularly, in a discussion with a would-be tour guide in
Arabic instead of French, that there are severe tensions in his relationship.
And although Jean seems to be kind and thoughtful to Abdellah there is, in his
cultural presumptions, something irritating and paternalistic in his behavior
with the young Moroccan.
In the very next scene, we discern that Abdellah has left Jean, but,
nonetheless, has been admitted into the university in Geneva where Jean
teaches. But now that Abdellah has broken away from his dependency on sex, he
has nowhere left to go. The university classes will not begin for another
month, and the young man is forced to sleep on park benches.
By accident, he encounters Jean in the halls of the university. Jean,
obviously hurt by Abdellah’s abandonment, tries to get a fuller explanation,
but once again Abdellah retreats into silence, claiming he has explained
everything in an earlier letter.
Jean argues that he always wanted for Abdellah to go to school and would
have financially made it possible; he feels that he, in fact, has been “used” as way for Abdellah to escape to
Europe. But Abdellah refuses to discuss the matter, and Taïa’s script refrains
from trying to explain the young man’s decisions.
Anyone who has followed carefully to the boy’s actions, however, might
recognize his position. When Jean accuses him of having been a prostitute, the
young man shouts out that indeed he has been just that, that he has used Jean as a way to escape to
Europe. But what we know is that, for the first time in his life, by leaving
Jean, Abdellah is coming into a new life through his own will alone. No longer
is he willing to simply enjoy privilege on the basis of his sexuality. Quite
the opposite of most “coming out” fictions, Taïa’s tale demonstrates how a gay
man must temporarily give up his old behavior, abandoning his passive sexuality
in order to truly make his own choice.
Refusing to give in to Jean’s easier offer, Abdellah seeks out asylum in
the local Salvation Army, where, in meeting another young Arab, he
expresses—even in his determination to make a new life for himself—a homesickness
for the world he has left, asking the young man, evidently a singer, to perform
one of his favorite songs from his troubled youth. We recognize that he finally
come to terms with who he is.
Los Angeles, June 7, 2015
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2015).
