Review: Four Daughters (2023)
The true story of a Tunisian woman and her family is a fascinating coup de cinema
Four Daughters (2023)
Written and directed by Kaouther Ben Hania
In this fascinating film, a Tunisian woman tells the story of raising four daughters mostly alone, and how two of them were lost.
The story is true and was the subject of news reports several years following the Arab Spring, which began in that country in 2010, and during the Islamic State era that followed. In the sense that this film tells a true story, it can be called a documentary, but most critics have used the term meta-documentary, for reasons that will shortly become clear.
So there are two ways to approach this film. One is by starting with the newsworthy events – which amount to a spoiler -- and then explaining how the film reports them. But the other way, which I will follow, is by talking about the film as the viewer experiences it: as a mystery.
(If you'd like to start with the spoiler, the link to the Guardian review is below.1 But if you’d rather experience the film without knowing the full story, the film will be much more interesting and more of an emotional experience if you don’t read it, and I urge you not to.
Ordinarily, I don’t make such a big deal about spoilers, and in some cases you can’t discuss a movie without them. In this case, it really does matter in terms of experiencing the film as its gifted writer-director, Kaouther Ben Hania, intends.)
The film begins with the mother, a working class woman in her 50s named Olfa Hamrouni, saying that two of her four daughters were “lost to the wolves,” but what this means is a mystery. As the viewer watches the film, the mystery is slowly revealed, and its full revelation by the time the film ends is all the more shattering. As for the film’s innovative structure, which accounts for the “meta-documentary” label, I think it’s just amazing.
The film features Olfa Hamrouni, the mother, and her two younger daughters, named Tassir and Eya, playing themselves. But in order to fully tell the family’s story, the film casts actors to play the two elder daughters who were “lost.” This enables Olfa and her daughters – both the real daughters playing themselves and the actors playing the “lost” daughters -- to enact scenes from the family’s history. (A single male actor, Majd Mastoura, plays whatever male role is necessary in some of these scenes, such as the man who becomes Olfa’s husband.)
Furthermore, the filmmaker furnishes an actor to play their mother in some scenes. The reason given is that “some scenes may be too emotional” for the mother to relive. But doubling Olfa with the actress Hind Sabri has an even more important effect. It enables the actress to query the real mother on camera, wearing the same costume, about her feelings and experiences, and to discuss with her the issues of childrearing and women’s roles in marriage and in Arab society.
These conversations are enlightening and give valuable context for the story’s events, they provide even more value by giving both women space to show emotion. The stories that Olfa tells are sometimes comic – or at least they seem funny to her in retrospect – and often heartbreaking. One might expect the actress to provide more emotion, through her training and professionalism. But the real Olfa Hamrouni is an electrifying screen presence. Whether she speaks directly to the camera, or to her real or substitute daughters en scene, or to the off-camera writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania, she displays genuine, direct emotion. The viewer is never in doubt about what she means and what she feels, because she never seems to withhold information or emotion. She intends to tell her story no matter what.
This means often being depicted as cruel. (Despite the out that the director provided her, she often re-enacts this cruelty herself.) She’s a complex person who did not succeed in protecting her daughters from violence and exploitation, but her regrets never seem to interfere with her resolution to tell her story and that of her family.
The actresses Nour Karoui and Ichrak Matar, who play the older, “lost” daughters, similarly interact with the younger real ones, sometimes speaking out of character to question the real sisters or their mother about the vanished women, and other times reenacting events in their lives. Their integration into the family is so effective that the viewer sometimes forgets that they are playing roles that they have learned, even though we have seen the learning taking place.
The effect of this doubling is multi-layered. As a viewer, I found that I could hold in my mind the knowledge that some of the people on the screen were real people playing themselves while others were actors, and at the same time fully become invested in the action and the emotions they were displaying. The effect was more striking when the younger daughters, who play themselves, spoke about their recollections of past events.
For example, at one point the younger daughters enter protective custody in a shelter for juveniles. The set for the staged scenes is also used for interviews where they tell the story of that chapter in their lives. They are both in and outside the story.
For some documentarists, this would present a source of confusion, because in most documentaries restaged events are staged to be as “real” as possible. In “Four Daughters,” a more dreamlike mood dominates, helped along by the constricted mise-en-scene: almost all of the action takes place in a house. This is suitable for a film that is mostly about the family life of a woman and her minor children, but it also reflects the reality of life as a woman in Arab society, where one’s presentation on the street is limited by social norms. Perhaps to emphasize the duality of inside/outside, the daughters invariably appear on screen in full makeup.
I haven’t even returned to the mystery of the older daughters’ disappearance, but it remains in the viewer's mind throughout the film as each story contributes to a deepening of the mystery or its solution. By the end of the film, the viewer knows the answer to the mystery, but like all good stories, the answer seems less important than the mystery and the journey through it. Indeed, some mystery remains, because we can’t hear from the missing women. Someday their own accounts of this story may be told.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/may/20/four-daughters-review-fact-and-fiction-mix-in-mothers-heartbreak-over-islamic-state