‘The Little Sister' Review: Nadia Melliti Makes A Striking Debut In Hafsia Herzi's Seductive Coming-Out Story
It's been seven years since Cate Blanchett led 82 women up the red carpet in protest at the male dominance of the world's biggest film festival. Some progress has been made since then — the number of female Palme d'Or winners has tripled in the meantime — but Cannes is still a long way from gender parity. But though the numbers aren't there yet (there are just seven female directors in Competition this year), the dial is moving in different and very welcome ways, bringing in new types of female-fronted stories.
The Little Sister is French actress Hafsia Herzi's third feature, but it has the freshness of a debut, which sounds like a back-handed compliment but actually isn't. Adapting Fatima Daas's semi-autobiographical 2022 novel The Last One, the story of a young gay Muslim woman's sexual awakening, Herzi confidently takes what could have been a traditional coming-out tale and turns it into something altogether more defiant, a character study that takes place in the no-man's-land between the oppressive certainties of childhood and the intoxicating freedoms of early adulthood.
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The bad old days of gay cinema in which gay characters had to be beaten black and blue, or even die, to qualify for redemption are long gone, and even though our heroine, Fatima (Nadia Melliti), is terrified that her family and friends in the majority-Muslim Parisian banlieue where she lives will find out, she has the most to fear from herself as she ties herself in knots in order to conform.
When we meet her in the springtime, she is about to take her baccalauréat (the exams that will take her from high school to college). Fatima is a good student, but she also has a temper and lashes out when a fellow student calls her lesbian. But she can't be a lesbian, since she has a Muslim boyfriend, who proposes marriage in the most unromantic way imaginable — 'It's better to make things official, isn't it?' he purrs — and talks creepily of the children they'll have together.
In the meantime, Fatima is experimenting with a dating app, arranging clandestine trysts with all kinds of women, starting with Linda, who gives her a verbal masterclass in the myriad possibilities of lesbian sex. She meets another girl in a lesbian bar — The Mutiny, a Parisian joint that appears to play itself — but this one is bisexual, where Fatima is into 'only girls.' By chance, while taking a class at a local 'school for asthmaa' Fatima is surprised to see the nurse there pop up on her app. She is Ji-na (Park-ji Min), a Korean immigrant since childhood, and the pair strike up an immediate rapport. Ji-na, though, has serious mental health issues, and Fatima is swiftly heartbroken.
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Herzi's film is far from over, however, as the seasons change (we pass through a whole year in total) and Fatima finds herself at a mixed and very bohemian university, where attitudes are relaxed and sexuality is fluid. Although she still dresses, ninja-style, like 'an Algerian Lara Croft,' Fatima starts to readjust, as we see in surprisingly strong sex scenes that suggest that Herzi has picked up a lot — but thankfully not too much — from Abdellatif Kechiche, with whom she made 2007's Couscous. Ji-na, though, is still heavy on her mind, as is the burden of being a good Muslim girl, which leads her to ask for guidance from her local imam. Reader, she does not find his 'wisdom' inspiring (even though lesbianism is 'not as serious as male homosexuality').
The light, almost hangout-movie quality of The Little Sister is likely to be divisive, but if you lean into its rhythms, it becomes deceptively seductive. Key to this is Melliti as the brittle but vulnerable Fatima, a talent so new that her talent rep lists her specialties as football, basketball, boxing and rap, none of which she does onscreen. This is the kind of talent Cannes urgently needs more of; cometh the hour, cometh the star.
Title: The Little SisterFestival: Cannes (Competition)Director: Hafsia HerziScreenwriter: Hafsia Herzi, adapted from the novel The Last One by Fatima DaasCast: Nadia Melliti, Park Ji-min, Amina Ben Mohamed, Rita Benmannana, Melissa GuersSales agent: MK2Running time: 1 hr 47 mins
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