Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Nora el Hourch
Starring: Léah Aubert, Médina Diarra, Salma Takaline, Oscar Al Hafiane, Mounir
Margoum, Bérénice Bejo
Originally titled "HLM Pussy", Sisterhood's English language territory distributors will likely be hoping to evoke
memories of Celine Sciamma's acclaimed 2014 film Girlhood. Focussed on the troubled lives of French-African teenage girls, Nora el Hourch's film would appear cut from the same cloth, but where Sciamma's film
was a coming-of-age character study, this is an often clunky social issues
drama that attempts to make so many intersectional points it leaves its
issues short-changed.
15-year-olds Amina (Leah Aubert), Djeneba (Médina Diarra)
and Zineb (Salma Takaline) have been friends since childhood, and
even Amina moving away from their working class neighbourhood hasn't
disrupted their relationship. That's despite the best efforts of Amina's
wealthy father Ahmed (Mounir Margoum) to separate his daughter from
a world he prides himself on escaping.
Cracks begin to surface in the three girls' friendship when Zineb is
targeted for increasingly sinister sexual harassment by her older
brother's drug dealing friend Zak (Oscar Al Hafiane). Amina insists
that they take action against Zak but Zineb doesn't want to cause trouble
and Djeneba doesn't take his aggression seriously. When Amina secretly
films one of Zak's creepy advances towards Zineb and posts it to social
media, it sets off a chain reaction of events that drives a wedge between
the girls' long-standing friendship.
Sisterhood is a commendable if coarse attempt to tackle the intersectional
conflicts of modern feminism, explicitly acknowledging how views on
feminism are shaped by cultural backgrounds. With a white mother and a
Moroccan father who has all but denounced his background in order to fit
in, Amina is essentially culturally white, and thus her views on how to
deal with Zak are coming from a very different place to her Black and
Algerian friends, who still hold on to more culturally conservative ideas.
When Amina posts the video she is instantly embraced by middle class white
girls and can't understand why Djeneba and Zineb aren't similarly hailing
her as a hero to all women. Djeneba accuses her of possessing a white
saviour mentality while Zineb is so confused by being simultaneously
exposed to the conflicting views of white liberal France and her
conservative Arab community that she can't figure out if she's actually a
victim.
This is a fascinating dynamic, but it's one that requires a stronger film
than Sisterhood. The sexual harassment plot is interrupted by a subplot concerning
Amina's conflict with her father, which again has much potential but is
messily handled here. There's a great movie to be made about how Gen-Z
youngsters of immigrant backgrounds are increasingly embracing the
cultures their parents and grandparents previously left behind in order to
adapt in an unwelcoming Europe, but this isn't it. Sisterhood has the feel of a tea-time TV show aimed at young people but made
by adults who are more concerned with preaching to kids than depicting
their actual lives and digging into their concerns. The depiction of
social media will likely have teenage viewers rolling their eyes at its
heavy handedness.
With Sisterhood we're watching two films trip over one another. One is a drama
about an Arab kid being told they're French while never feeling like
that's really the case; the other an examination of how class, religion
and culture shapes how young girls view their place in society. Both have
so much potential that it's a shame El Hourch can't make them work in
tandem. The film is saved from being a sloppy sermon by the three central
performances, with Aubert and Diarra particularly impressive. France
currently has a host of talented women filmmakers, so I look forward to
seeing what they might do with these young stars in the coming
years.
