Sami Outalbali

(On TV, November 2022) I was, frankly, surprised by Une histoire d’amour et de désir. My motives in watching the film were not noble—the film’s log-line promised something about “erotic Arab literature” and that was enough for me. But this French-Tunisian film belongs to a category of movies nearly extinct on this side of the Atlantic: The slow-burn romantic drama that (not being held back by American puritanism) eventually veers into eroticism. Much of the story focuses on a young freshman during his first year at La Sorbonne—a singularly conservative, straightlaced, even boring young man of Algerian origins who meets a firebrand of a classmate, a Tunisian girl who couldn’t be more different from him. Their courtship is drawn-out, filled with reversals (mostly due to him lacking the nerve to follow through) and is surrounded by other subplots, from his sister being a bit too promiscuous to the need for him to reclaim his origins by, say, learning enough Arabic to read the inscription she left him in a book. This kind of material could have gone wrong (or at least felt dull) in very many different ways, but writer-director Leyla Bouzid has a solid handle on her material, and benefits from two good young actors in key roles. Zbeida Belhajamor easily gets all of the attention: her role, after all, is to be an object of pure lust for the protagonist, and she achieves that—even if her glorious curly mane does half the work, the other half remains crucial. In comparison, Sami Outalbali gets a more difficult role as an indecisive, rigid, stick-in-the-mud protagonist who has to get out of his shell—but he eventually makes it work. It’s a fairly rare romantic drama from a male perspective (and executed by a woman, to make things even more interesting—from the first moments of the film, there’s quite a bit of female gaze going on) and it’s through a bunch of bittersweet moments that it earns its uplifting ending. Its portrait of young people in Paris is held back by shooting in South Africa, but the child-of-immigrants mindset portrayed here is culturally interesting. But it’s in comparison with other movies that Une histoire d’amour et de désir finds an additional dimension, perhaps as proof of what could be possible if filmmakers let go of formula and self-censorship: maybe, then, we’d get movies exploring more facets of humanity as it truly lives.