dir. Raja Amari
Opens Fri Sept 6 at the Varsity.
Satin Rouge is an easy FIlm to like. It celebrates something that's always worth celebrating: the sexual liberation of women. Directed by Raja Amari, the film is about a Tunisian widow (Hiyam Abbas) who spends her days cleaning her apartment, speaking to her dead husband, who is framed on her dresser (above the drawer containing her plain panties), watching soap operas, and spying on her nubile daughter.
The widow is a woman of principle. She doesn't go out; she is obedient to the codes of her society and class. She knows the basics of belly dancing, but it's a dormant cultural thing (like an erotic painting in a museum--Watteau's The Pleasures of Love, for example) rather than an active part of her life.
One day, while spying on her daughter, who is taking belly dancing lessons at school, the widow discovers that her daughter and the young drummer who accompanies the lessons are lovers. On another day, while buying fruit, the widow spots the drummer and follows him to where he works at night, a notorious cabaret. After several late-night visits to this club, she forms a friendship with an accomplished belly dancer and, inevitably, begins belly dancing. The primal en- ergy of the dancing transforms her into a new, vibrant, voracious, and voluptuous woman.
There two points I must make. First, the film is about the modernization of the widow: her progress from tradition to liberation. What is fascinating is that such a traditional form--belly dancing, rather than something Western--facilitates this modernization. Second, there is a Public Enemy song that opens with a quote that says something like, "The content of society is determined by the character of its women." Similarly, in Satin Rouge the content of a nation, Tunisia, is measured by the state of a woman--the degree of her freedoms, opportunities, and so on. Judging from Satin Rouge's heroine, Tunisian society is in great shape.
