Posts
written by Mohammed Ennaji
Much Loved
Or the cinema of imposture
I will not begin to complain about the brutality of the image nor will I speak, later, of the heavy, because inexhaustible, flow of grossness undiluted in the image, where the spectator becomes just a listener who is immersed in a chasm without thematic justification even less aesthetic. To move a spectator, with taste and mastery, that's the cinema among others. The brutality of a look or a scene can go as far as to chill the spectator, it is the force of the economy of the features, the reflections, the words which is the secret of the recipe and not the avalanche torrential, still less when it is by dint of insanities. I will not speak of vulgarity or violence either. A subject such as this, and other subjects of other themes, certainly need brutality because they abound in life.
Yes, of course, the image, in this case that I want to treat, wants to be strong, brutal, it would be designed to shock! But a work of art is not made to shock, and if it does, it must first please, raise awareness. Yes even when it comes to misery, yes! Baudelaire has passed by, and when he describes a corpse one is seized by the beauty of the text while forgetting the putrefaction, the beauty then redeems the infected, the life resumes its rights on the death.
In the cinema the image is essential, it must be beautiful, even filming death, murder ... Otherwise the author must not make a film, he must not deceive the nature of his goods. And the image, in Much Loved, is poor because it wants to be singularly brutal without putting the way, and it is not, it shocks but does not pity, do not sensitize. Irma the sweet is one of the movies I saw young and I never forgot, and I make the effort to convince myself that Irma is a prostitute, she did not leave me naturally this impression! She is so beautiful, so sweet, so loving! Yes, and for this reason the interior becomes richer, more fruitful, more critical of the human soul. His fragility in front of his mac at the edge of the film shows us a tender woman and symbolizes its social fragility. In Much Loved this is not the case, we resort to ugliness on all levels to convince us of the ugliness of the phenomenon of prostitution, but that's our starting point, the viewer knows who comes to cinema see how the director goes about it, how the film is conceived, executed to bring us something else that we do not know to see directly, with the naked eye, in the experience. We discover in the share of the prostitute something other than what we say the look lambda!
I will limit myself, as far as my abilities are concerned, to an aesthetic look, and, in order to clear myself because of my ignorance of illiterate cinema, to writing because I am not a filmmaker but a simple worker of the verb. The image is however not quite foreign to me, the writer also resorts to the image by soliciting it by means of the writing, or rather created of the image with the writing, sometimes it is true in abundance, when his verb and his imagination lend themselves to it. He does it without needing to resort to illustration.
The filmmaker has the privilege of having the image for a mode of expression, for language. It needs the verb, but cinema is first and foremost the image, otherwise we would not have called silent cinema . However, he adds the written word to the image, to unlock the scenes, which, sometimes stuck in a silence too heavy, risk wasting meaning and not capture as it deserves the look. But he also uses the verb to calm the bubbling image and bring out its silence on its surface, or to lead the image, arm in arm, until the end of its truth, until it unpacked her said and her unsaid, thus opening the closets that she does not always consent to open, to get out the corpses who are ambushed, to allow the image to breathe because it stifles sometimes and needs a relay, a kind of intercessor to go to the end of his saying. Thus the verb's role is to exorcise the image when it does not lend itself to the game. Let's say that the filmmaker has the chance to write with both tools at once and he is obliged to take care of it, not spoil either of them. The arrangement between the image and the text varies according to the subjects, according to the countries, according to the cultural levels and obviously, according to the artist!
When the latter tackles the question of freedom, since it is the theme that interests us here, he is only spoiled for choice in a country like ours. Whatever the aspect of the social, cultural or political life that attracts his attention, the subjects abound and jump almost to the eyes. But precisely for that and because of that, the approach by writing or by image is more difficult than expected, more complicated than elsewhere. The abundance of the themes is in fact misleading, the garish appearance of the taboo makes us believe in the facility, but there is far, as they say, the cut to the lips! There are prisons, there are political prisoners, there are some poor people, prostitutes, homosexuals, .... But it is the angle of attack that is complicated, it is the aesthetic approach, especially in the cinema that is difficult, because it resorts to what seems at first sight easy, to the image that gives the illusion of reproducing reality. In fact, cinema flourishes more easily, more solidly, where there is already creation, especially writing, painting and other sectors. This is not the case here in our country where the destruction of the school for decades has screwed up artistic training depriving it of its cultural depth, the elementary knowledge necessary for its development because central in the awakening of the intelligence of things.
I will say, in this context, a few words relating to this subject on a film that made noise, which made the buzz, and the term is appropriate as if the product is intended to live only as a rumor. This is Much Loved. The film interests me not only because it is part of the theme of the conference - Let's recall how much this theme of sexual freedom in Muslim countries is selling in France in particular and how much is used wrongly and through! - but also because it is part of a trend currently in vogue, which claims the treatment of taboos, in the cinema, in writing, in painting, and which, in the end, is content with the expedients of creating paradoxically a stir around a product before it is put on the market or even without it being put on the market, otherwise to sell it as a "virtual" product dealing with a taboo, militant product for the freedom to work in the artistic field to ban it. For Much Loved it is particularly salient because it is banned in Morocco, by dint of artifice, to sell in France under the label of censored work that needs the solidarity of the artistic world "free" against the obscurantist Islamic context. The communicating vessels work here wonderfully, the pressure on one side makes the other overflow!
The film deals with prostitution in Morocco, more precisely in Marrakech. At the beginning, the words precede the image, a torrential rain of words, not the words of a sad song, a melody, a complaint, a cry that the night of the screen inflated with Darkness could authorize, not just words that want to be a blast but turn out to be wet squibs, a noisy and gratuitous chatter that violates the modesty of a theme that speaks alone in all discretion: Whores, that's how Let them be presented to us, who say they are whores, and repeat it in a thousand shades, as if we were in danger of believing that the film was about the sex of the angels.
The author is here in a hurry, perhaps overwhelmed by the richness of a theme that society itself, conscious of its seriousness, says in a low voice. Said, talk, balance, mistreat the organs of women whose function is to be violated, to go to the torture, to be the offering of a society to the sexual genius that haunts her. He speaks when it would have been better to keep quiet, when it would have been better to introduce the images themselves gently without deflowering them. These women, he would have liked to introduce them one by one as on a stage, each of them has a story, is a story, and their mines, their looks, their paces speak for themselves without them chatter over and over again.
These women, because of their status, of their marginality, already play, themselves, a role, shirk behind their words, they interpret a role because by modesty they remove from people that they do not know their identity deep that they end up burying themselves deep inside. It is the silence that should be made to see them betray themselves and let appear the pitiful ugliness of the job. To make them speak of abundance, in the same register and with the same terms, makes the thread lose and becomes a redundancy, redundancies because they are several women whereas the story is one and only one, that it must dig with the appropriate tools and the necessary intelligence. No way, gossip is de rigueur in this movie.
The taboo can not be a pure pretext for dealing with freedom. It is a starting point, but in no case can it justify and legitimize mediocrity or deception, and here it is indeed the case. Because what is a work that is not visible or even illusory where it is supposed to denounce and explain? What is a work that does not transmit a lesson, what is a work that does not open the eyes by dismantling the mechanisms? What is a work claiming to be artistic that is unsightly? The taboo is of public notoriety, we can or explain the genesis and explain the ins and outs or be content to haggle the use?
This phenomenon is very visible in writing and singing, we have seen examples of this in the last protests that have set some regions of Morocco on fire. The protest takes place in the street, so someone is singer because we shout the slogans of the protest believing to give him scope when we just borrow his. And in the immediacy of the action, one is automatically greeted by the crowd which finds an echo of itself at this moment where it with the apogee of its innocence, all the more as the singer titled "revolutionary" , finds himself arrested by the authority for incitement to revolt, which completely changes the debate on artistic creation. The claim of freedom in art is something else than in the street, it does not consist in the formulation of the slogan but in the sublimation of which the challenge will be the subject in a film. Otherwise we are content with a documentary. When Nass El Ghiwane had ignited the sixties and seventies, in some of their masterpieces they resumed traditional themes unrelated to a revolution. But it was a way to meet for the listener, to "identify".
The creation, whether cinematographic or literary, relating to freedom should not hold its "legitimacy" and its authenticity of the repression of the authorities or their censorship, the reason is not enough. It should not be a primary defender of liberty by wearing slogans or simply by addressing the forbidden as an act that takes precedence over the work even when it is not one. Unfortunately, the disastrous state in which the school finds itself nowadays does not favor the formation of taste or the generation of a solid artistic and literary criticism that is not cold to tell the whole truth.
It is in this context that I speak of Much Loved film whose title already, is curious, which seems to deal with an exotic subject. Its only objective is to position the film in a posture that is not the writing on freedom and the adoption of a free approach of artistic writing but simply the play on the effect of announcement of taboo in a Muslim society that the foreign viewer is supposed to represent as closed and hateful of a phenomenon like prostitution. The taboo and agitation on the web around a product, finds in itself its own purpose, the theme of prostitution is the beginning and the end, not a reflection, an artistic creation on the theme.
Much Loved is one of those soulless films, born in one of two, in a thousand of them even, in a vague and indeterminate space, in the markets of globalization, where culture is cowardly and bastard, a culture that, beyond the penny that haunts her, she finds herself lost, taking paths that the media echoes transfigure. Such films have no rooting in a real, in an identity, they fly away with the winds, grafted as they are on shapeless bodies with indecisive contours. These films are thematic only noise and they end up getting lost in the rumor. In the specific case that challenges us the title alone reveals the ambiguity of the project, a title foreign to the land and its people, which does not stick to the theme, which reveals the deviousness of the project intended to be sold as "work ", Excuse the use of the word, forbidden in the country of the Levant. Much Loved is an export product concocted in a "cultural" tax haven where objective criticism is forbidden.
A free and rigorous work around freedom, freedom of thought, freedom to conceive, freedom to claim, which is thought and executed in the rules of art, will not necessarily be censored. We can cite cases in literature as in other fields, because the aforementioned work refuses to be primary in its approach to an issue. The problem today is that censorship often becomes the means to communicate around a film or a book and especially to sell it without even knowing its actual content even less its aesthetic value. Much Loved is the product not only of the rumor and pieces skilfully balanced on Youtube, it is also the product of an imaginary which is neither the real one even less a creation starting from the real one.
It turns out that the key word here is the lack of freedom. The author has not questioned the depths of the social which raises the theme of prostitution, he did not probe this magmatic core which ejects undesirables including prostitutes who are not always the product of misery. No, he used on the job, a heap he invented as the expression of the subject, the error is thus in the fruit, the sample is basically distorted. The author unknowingly unpacked like a beginner who emptied his bag in a hurry because the theme is too big and he can not seem to kiss it: "Who kisses too badly hugs" says the popular wisdom, but here he was not even about kissing! This imprudent and misplaced logorrhea, in a theme where precedence comes right back to the image, gives the impression of a mountaineer at the foot of a mountain, gigantic for him, where he fails to climb to the heights steep, and he tries from the beginning to the end to fix his supports but his ice ax does not take, his crampons slide on the ice, he skates instead of going up, so he invokes the theme in words, he climbs in giving himself the illusion of climbing for good relief. Words are not here anymore, they are rather a refuge!
Freedom in the cinematographic writing as in all creation supposes a great requirement of rigor, and here, a balance between the image and the verb. The more the image speaks in silence the stronger it is, the more it has content, its density is very high to leave to the verb only the congruent portion, which it must make good use where with a word economy it amplifies the image .
Creation consists of lifting the veil on the apparent, to say the real otherwise than it is in its visible appearance for the common. Even in realistic painting, the painter goes to the end of nature or the beings he paints, he offers to the sight their beauty or their ugliness as it is incapable of grasping them of itself. The writing and the image go beyond the documentary, because the writer and the filmmaker are thoroughly researched to get to the bottom of what they want to talk about. The author in Much Loved is overwhelmed by the subject, he lets himself be cluttered by events: he is trapped by the appearance that he can not overcome, he gets stuck in it. Instead of going to the bottom, he stays on the surface, and even invents a subject by repeating the same images, by dint of making his prostitutes a little delirious as if they are fevered by their ugliness, as if they was the only thing they knew how to do, as if they were not beings in their own right.
Let's go back to the opening of "Irma the sweet". Silence, cheerful music and a colorful neighborhood. The colors of girls' outfits too, eccentric as their make-up simply say, silently the job, in this sad joy with its prefabricated air. A customer enters the arms of a prostitute, the heroine Irma, both go up the stairs. Then looming upstairs the window of the room, we guess the frolics we do not see, then the light we have to discover the man putting his jacket back and paying his due. All is said. We are far from the grotesque and often clumsy vocabulary because it feels the search and the effort, the more the artifice, to flush out into the filthy lexicon.
I tried to make a statistical countdown in this jungle of waste that reflects the humanity of these women, their sensitivity, in other words the deep and complex plot of their feelings in the background, in other words behind the curtain, chasing them almost of the landscape. Counting them apart makes them extricate themselves from their social milieu as if they lived in a strange and separate place. The word Qahba otherwise says the word which par excellence names the prostitute here, say to be more direct: the bitch, is formulated more than fifty times. This word, rehashed, rehearsed as much, setting the tone in each sequence as for sticking pieces that have sore joints, underlines the need for the author to recall that it deals with the theme of prostitution, and refers to his inability
But what is this word that we hear back? Qahba, which is the common word in popular speech, is a word of the classical Arabic language. Etymology tells us that the term is derived from coughing. The whore was the one who coughed to signal her presence to the customers concerned. Interesting already: that means that she did not differ from other women nor in her presentation by the clothing or make-up that would have revealed to her alone, much less in her language. She was a normal woman, like a fish in the water. In other words, prostitution is a phenomenon of which marginal beings or even professionals were not actors. It was then a seasonal activity, part time say, which becomes important at the time of the pilgrimage for example. On the other hand, prostitutes did not resort to a specific signal, they were limited to coughing, which is a banal gesture that everyone uses without paying attention, an index of normality still in this social environment. Saudi. In other testimonies we speak of prostitutes with signs of sorts, which confirms the fact that they needed a clue to signal to customers.
In the film, prostitution is denounced, it is to be sold not to be understood. Prostitutes find themselves reduced to shrewd machines.
The director has not given himself the means to dig to get to the bottom of the haunting freedom of beings whose outlets have been sealed for a long time. Her heroines are looking for freedom where she is not, where originally they did not find her. He refers them to the structures of sociability that put them out, to the family, the father and the mother, who continue to quarantine them. The often nocturnal incursions in the parents are a used expedient, whose facility reveals the incapacity of an author to create, to force the image of a woman in search of freedom.
The images suffer from a drop in their spatial and temporal levels: the journeys in the medina in broad daylight as in the middle of the night break with the coarseness of the pornographic images, there is no junction, no liaison, one leaves the night clubs and brothels to roam the night of the night misery of a city where marginals of all kinds are lost in the dark. The illusion of moving from one image to another is provided by the means of locomotion that is the car that plays the function of a cage not of caged birds but of bullies folded into a dirty universe. The play on contrasts is absent or insufficiently used, between day and night, between inside and outside, between whores with their clients and whores between them. But the true junction, the true transition which is that of the idea that will fertilize the image is absent. The narrative platitude is obvious, these outings are like a flight of a universe of parts of legs in the air of which all eroticism is absent, a way for the cameraman to breathe nothing else.
This film is disappointing, it resorts to subterfuges to play a cultural scene. It fits without a shadow of a doubt in a cinema of imposture!
Mohammed Ennaji, March, 2018
