Third director’s work for Hafsia Herzi, The smallest (La petite dernière) is taken from the self-finned Fatima Daas novel released in 2020. The film currently at the cinema with Fandango, even before leaving had become the subject of discussions. Let’s examine the reasons together and then look further to discover the film behind the social tide.
La più piccola: nelle proprie contraddizioni
Fatima is 17 years old and is, in fact, the smallest of three daughters of a Franco-Algerian family who lives on the outskirts of Paris. The girl is loved by everyone but always a little fish fuor of water: in the family, at school, with friends and in the relationship with her boyfriend. It is in the passage to the chaotic and new world of the university that Fatima, a practicing Muslim, begins to understand that she is attracted to women. Through four seasons, that of the girl is a path of exploration and continuous negotiation, of search of her own identity not flattening its complexity but finding spaces of balance within it.
Divieto sì, divieto no
The reason why the film is in the middle of the media cyclone is because it has recently been categorized as forbidden to under 14 years (exclusively) in Italy. cited as the motivation “explicit sexual references”, as much as their “not [be] transformed into pornographic images is recognized. It is also true that most people from both sides of the controversy did not see the film. To anyone who has it is evident that the sexual content in The smallest (in words and above all in images) is extremely blanda, and the only point of difference that it has with thousands of similar coming-of-ages without restrictions is that we talk about relationships among women. To give her the benefit of doubt categorization appears to be the daughter of a questionably antiquated world vision; to those who want to think badly, it might seem a political and “punishing” act towards Fandango.
La più piccola: deliziosamente (?) descrittivo
But all this has nothing to do with the film, which in its textual essence is much less a statement than it appears by reading thinkpiece titles and online discussions. The story of Fatima is presented in a surprisingly descriptive way, a coming-of-age queer in which the thesis is simply “this person exists, in all its complexity”. This approach is at the same time a point of strength and weakness: because if on the one hand the smallest is a film that (especially in retrospective) appears “pure” as few, on the other it lacks incisiveness at the point of view of the content. From a visual point of view, poetics is more defined, intense even if under a certain point of view a little school, with a look that, even if at times a little too commercial, remains perhaps the strongest aspect of the film.
Il cast
Nadia Melliti is Fatima, a French Algerian girl who lives the conflict between her faith and her homosexuality. Park Ji-min in is Ji-na, a young nurse with depression problems with which Fatima establishes an overwhelming relationship. Louis Memmi is Benjamin, a high school and friend of Fatima, while Mouna Soualem is Cassandra, a mysterious cousin of a university friend.
L’articolo The smallest: film review at the center of the controversy because forbidden to under 14 years comes from Dituttounpop.it.
