"Why did we have a revolution? People have died for their rights," snaps a character in “Beauty and the Dogs,” the latest film from Tunisian writer and director Kaouther Ben Hania. His stubbornness is directed at Mariam, a college student who has just been raped and resists filing a report at the police station.
Having made major advancements in women’s rights in recent years and benefited the most from the Arab Spring, Tunisia has gradually become the most progressive state in the region. Thus, Ben Hania’s film, which takes place after the impeachment of Tunisian leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, can be seen as both a period piece set at a time of transition and a dissection of Tunisia's remaining bureaucratic and chauvinistic ills that have yet to be fully eradicated.
On a cinematic level, the bravura filmmaking, immediacy and dexterity of Ben Hania’s craft is a testament to the great leap that post-Jasmine Revolution Tunisian cinema has made. What it still largely lacks is original ideas, or rather inventive treatments of the abiding concerns of the day. “Beauty and the Dogs” is a case in point, as its formal ambitions eventually get the better of it, plunging the narrative into the type of angry, simplistic and redundant rhetoric from which North African cinema is still struggling to move away.
"Beauty" commences as Mariam, played by newcomer Mariam Al Ferjani, slips into a moderately sexy dress for a college party at a Tunis disco. Light flirtation ensues between her and Youssef (Ghanem Zrelli), and the pair hit it off on the dance floor. In the next scene, we find out that Mariam has been raped by a group of policemen in a car — an incident that occurs entirely off screen. Youssef escorts her to document the rape in a hospital, the first stop of a long, Kafkaesque journey of bureaucracy, misogyny and violation. She is refused entry on the grounds that she must first file a report at the police station. Later on, the police, in repeated breaches of the law, attempt to shelve the case by terrorizing her to withdraw her testimony.
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