A French Muslim’s Moving Lesbian Awakening

Just like American cinema never wearies of road movies, French cinema has long been littered with sexual coming-of-age films: tales of young people exploring their bodies, appetites and identities over the course of a sun-soaked summer vacation, a tumultuous school year or a few formatively horny days.

As with any popular category of movie, a certain numbing redundancy — if not laziness — sets in after a while; few recent entries have had the tingle of discovery that allowed Maurice Pialat’s To Our Loves, André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds and various Catherine Breillat works to fire up our memories and imaginations, to say nothing of our loins.

Occasionally, however, a new one comes along that cuts right through the crowd with its confidence and texture, its erotic charge and lingering nostalgic ache. Hafsia Herzi’s superb The Little Sister (La petite dernière), about a French Muslim teenager’s lesbian awakening, is such a film, joining Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color, Rebecca Zlotowski’s An Easy Girl and Téchiné’s Being 17 in the very top tier of contemporary examples.

Vibrantly felt yet impressively controlled — and blessed with a stone-cold stunner of a central performance — The Little Sister is indeed an instant classic of the genre, as moving in its humanism as it is sexy. The particular intersection of communities depicted here (LGBTQ and Muslim), as well as a handful of Sapphic scenes for the ages, gives the drama an undeniable jolt of freshness. But the film stands easily on its own merits, dispelling any doubts that may have greeted its inclusion in this year’s main competition.

This third directorial outing from 38-year-old Herzi (a César-winning actress who exploded onto the scene in Kechiche’s 2007 The Secret of the Grain) — her first two, while well-received at home, never secured U.S. distribution — is worthy of attention well beyond French borders; in a just world, it would be a major international breakout for both the helmer and lead Nadia Melliti, whose gorgeously modulated body-and-soul performance is one of the most auspicious screen debuts I’ve seen in a while.

Though the subject matter, with its core conflict between personal desires and religious pressures, might have lent itself to didacticism or preachiness, Herzi proves a supremely nimble and nuanced storyteller. Freely adapting Fatima Daas’ autobiographical 2020 novel, she boasts an unerring sense of pacing, a ripe naturalistic visual style, and an agile way with tone, marrying humor, heat and surging emotion. Perhaps less surprising is Herzi’s success in coaxing across-the-board terrific work from the cast, down to the smallest role; even characters who appear fleetingly make vivid impressions.

The film opens on high-school senior Fatima (Melliti) performing religious rituals — washing herself before prayer; kneeling and bowing, dressed in full hijab — at home in the working-class projects outside Paris. It’s a world Herzi fills in with warmth and economy, using deft brushstrokes to immerse us in her protagonist’s life.

The family apartment is full of typical irritations and affections, with teasing older sisters, a doting mother bustling about the kitchen and a TV-glued father griping good-naturedly from the couch. Her long, raven-black hair pulled into a no-nonsense ponytail, Fatima is a watchful tomboy with a talent for soccer and a group of rowdy male friends (one of whose salaciously embellished account of a date with a pair of “MILFs” is a crude comic high point). She suffers from asthma, attending check-ins with an endearingly nerdy doctor. She’s kinda-sorta seeing a courtly but conservative young Muslim man who wants to take things to the next level — marriage, kids, etc. Her halfhearted responses to his overtures amount to a clear “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Fatima is also a gifted student, captivated in class as her buddies goof off around her. When their banter turns homophobic — in that banal way that seems timeless for certain teenage boys — she stays silent. In one wrenching scene, she even contributes to the bullying of a gay classmate, lashing out violently when he shifts the spotlight onto her sexuality. Fatima’s terror of being outed is palpable here, her poised stoicism giving way to an almost feral panic and shame.

One night, she creates a profile on a lesbian hook-up app. Soon after, Fatima is sitting in a car with an older woman, Ingrid (Sophie Garagnon), getting an explanatory (as opposed to experiential) crash course in lesbian sexual “specialties.” Part of what makes the scene sweet and spicy and unexpected is how quickly Ingrid pivots from seductress to mentor. Intuiting that what Fatima wants at this point isn’t to have sex, but to talk about sex — to hear it demystified and destigmatized — Ingrid draws her out of her shell, fielding questions with flirty, faintly wistful amusement.

It’s an initiation that readies Fatima for a more lasting connection with Ji-Na, a 20something nurse (the electric Park Ji-Min of Return to Seoul) whom she meets-cute at an asthma management seminar. Later, as the two quiz each other about their backgrounds, hobbies and hopes over a Seine-side dinner, we feel the ticklish pleasure of their mutual curiosity. Herzi shows us something simple, and universal, yet rarely actually captured onscreen: the bit-by-bit building of a human connection.

Fatima and Ji-Na are something of an odd couple, the former’s panther-like litheness and circumspection contrasting with the latter’s more direct, puppyish energy. But their bond makes sense, partly because both are ethnic outsiders in France: Fatima is the only member of her family not born in Algeria, while Ji-Na moved to Paris from Korea at age five. As their relationship progresses from first kisses (this is a film in which people really kiss) to Pride March, nights on the town to noodles at home, the movie conjures a whole world of intimacy and freedom beginning to open to Fatima.

Things, of course, don’t go as planned, but life goes on. Fatima starts university, studying philosophy and making new friends — a merry band of queer boys, quite the corrective to her macho high-school crew. She also falls in with some slightly older lesbians, led by Cassandra (Mouna Soualem, divine), an irrepressible, ringlet-headed sexpot with a smoky gasp of a voice. Immediately clocking Fatima’s broken heart, Cassandra barrels past her defenses, taking our protagonist under her wing (and into her and her girlfriend’s bed). Scenes of them together nail the euphoric thrill of youthful experimentation and self-discovery.

But following every night of ecstasy comes a lonely, bleary-eyed morning-after. Melliti has a proud, almost regal gaze that, in these moments, clouds over with melancholy and anxiousness. Fatima knows she’s changing — drifting in fundamental ways from her family and upbringing, but also remaining on the margins of a community she doesn’t yet claim as her own. That type of liminal existence feels untenable for someone as essentially honest as Fatima, and the question that haunts the film is why she, or anyone in today’s France, should have to choose between integral parts of herself.

The Little Sister is clear-eyed about the virtual impossibility, for some religious LGBTQ people, of disclosing their sexual preference to loved ones. Still, Herzi is steadfastly non-judgmental in her vision of Islam and its centrality in Fatima’s life. The filmmaker isn’t interested in any scathing indictment of religion, but rather in how layered and complex identities are, and in how Fatima’s refusal to deny either her sexuality or her spirituality is in itself an act of faith — in herself, in an Islam that doesn’t seem to have room for her, and in a country whose historic disdain for multiculturalism and communitarianism means that it may be unprepared for her as well.

In some ways, The Little Sister brings to mind Dee Rees’ Pariah, another queer coming-of-age story set against a tradition-bound domestic backdrop. But while the main character’s mother in that movie was an antagonistic figure, Fatima’s parents are portrayed as kind, not dogmatic or ostentatiously pious. (Islamic strictures are articulated only late in the film by an imam whom Fatima consults in desperation.) Fatima’s mom (Amina Ben Mohamed), especially, is a nurturing presence; her sighing with pride as she affixes her daughter’s diploma to the wall is a touching grace note.

She also appears at least outwardly oblivious to the nature of her daughter’s struggle — or so we think until a penultimate scene that’s like a small exhalation of breath we weren’t even aware of holding. That this exchange between Fatima and her mother stops short of being an explicit breakthrough is significant, an acknowledgement that the outcomes of situations like these are often imperfect. The Little Sister is imbued, finally, with a bittersweet acceptance of the limitations of the people, institutions and communities we hold dear.

Herzi’s filmmaking is polished and precise, though never fastidious; the movie crackles with loose, lived-in vitality and moment-to-moment authenticity. Working with DP Jérémie Attard, Herzi frames her actors tenderly, making generous use of close-ups without hovering or ogling. Géraldine Mangenot’s editing and Amine Bouhafa’s lovely score, by tuns churning and contemplative, help give the proceedings an enrapturing ebb and flow.

The film’s perfect final shot has a piercing ambiguity. A casual glimpse of Fatima that blossoms with meaning in retrospect, epitomizing her individuality, her tenacity and resolve, it’s at once shattering and profoundly hopeful. That it can be felt in such diametrically differing ways at the same time is a testament to the unassuming richness of this wise, altogether wonderful film.