The worst trauma for a queer person — other than homophobia pressing in from the outside world — to endure is being told they’re gay by everyone around them before they themselves have come to terms with it. Especially in the high school years, when you barely have a firm sense of being a person at all, let alone whose sexuality skews errant of being straight.
French-Tunisian-Algerian filmmaker Hafsia Herzi, an actress-turned-filmmaker directing her fourth feature here, peels back that unfortunately commonplace phenomenon in her latest, “The Little Sister.” This poignantly told if at times jaggedly paced film follows Muslim soccer player Fatima (striking newcomer Nadia Melliti) across five seasons (beginning with one year’s spring and into the next year’s) as she experiences lesbian love for the first time, and as the sexuality she slowly comes to assert and understand clashes against the religious dogma she was raised amid.
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At the center of “The Little Sister” is a rocky romance with medical student Ji-Na (“Return to Seoul” breakout Park Ji-min), Fatima’s first female lover. As with most formative and finally reciprocated queer relationships, it’s one rushed into without foretelling of the consequences or one another’s neuroses, or where or why one might be ahead of the other in terms of their own queer journey.
Titled “La Petite Dernière” in French in reference to Fatima being the youngest and last-to-fall-from-the-tree of her siblings, Herzi’s film opens with Fatima washing her tawny, muscular arms and preparing for the 5 a.m. call to prayer, the only times we’ll see her in full Hijab. It’s an activity she’s fashioned into a private one, as the other spheres of Fatima’s daily life resemble any from the West. Despite beginning in ablution, “The Little Sister” is anything but dogmatic; the film is just establishing her routine, the discipline needed to maintain a life of secrecy.
Seventeen years old, Fatima is in her last year of high school, readying for baccalaureate studies in Paris. She engages in the recognizable schoolyard chatter, smoking with her peers and talking about sex in a mixed school where Oscar Wilde’s Victorian classic “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” also about a protagonist staring down themselves and their sexuality albeit with much more dire and gothic ends, is on the curriculum. Fatima lives a generally Westernized life, even with her bustling family at home, who’ve embraced French customs while retaining the basics of their Algerian immigrant background.
Refreshingly in “The Little Sister,” Fatima’s family isn’t especially harsh or suspicious or strict, though a telling conversation at the film’s end, when Fatima comes home from yet another tumultuous night out, finds her mother telling her to be careful out there or else one day she’ll get assaulted. “I’ll assault them,” says Fatima, strong in will and in physicality — a physicality that, as she enters that fateful last summer before college and even into her university days, seems a dead giveaway to some peers that she might be a lesbian.
Fatima bonds with a big-sister type, who tells her about “eating ass” and opens the door just a bit to the possibilities of the queer world awaiting outside her. Over the course of the summer, Fatima sparks a sealed-with-a-look attraction with medical student Ji-Na during a preparatory course encounter. Their psyche-erupting meet cute proves just as quickly ruinous and unraveling, and not exactly the type to set the right tone for queer encounters ahead. After a seemingly lovely night together (“The Little Sister” doesn’t spare in the sounds and sensations of kissing queer for the first time) Fatima emerges from Ji-Na’s bedroom to find Ji-Na in a heap of herself. There’s weed and benzos strewn on the coffee table, Ji-Na telling Fatima to run away fast, that she can’t be fixed, implying some kind of debilitating depression or mental illness Fatima’s Korean-French girlfriend was heretofore able to keep at bay.
Adapting an autofiction novel called “The Last One” by Fatima Daas, Herzi’s film strains to make the case that Fatima’s romance with Ji-Na was some kind of unforgettably passionate fling. Inherently, those first queer relationships certainly can be that, but not always. When Ji-Na re-emerges in one of the film’s later season chapters, begging to reconcile, saying that their relationship just moved too fast and became too overwhelming too suddenly, it isn’t totally believable beyond the words she’s saying. And what is one to do with someone’s easy words, a former lover telling you to come back without making the right points? “The Little Sister,” though, does capture that feeling where the text from an ex can torpedo one’s entire night and sense of self.
The film’s most moving and shrewdly staged sequence finds Fatima, mid-sexual-freefall in college, in the office of an imam, under the pretense of one of those “so a friend of mine…” confessions. The unfeeling imam assumes Fatima’s talking about a friend who’s had an extramarital relationship with a man, but when Fatima corrects him that this friend of hers was in fact seeing a woman, the imam reminds that homosexuality is still a sin in the eyes of Islam. Though perhaps lesbian sex is less sinful since it’s just “fondling,” and not penetrative, like the Sodomite gay men of Christian biblical history he warns of.
Melliti’s breakout performance is arrestingly restrained but never emotionally inscrutable, Jérémie Attard’s camera holding on the actor’s face in wordless moments where she slides into tears under the looming and unstoppable threat of her own repression (religious, self-induced, and otherwise) coming unbound. The film’s split into five chapters (the last, in yet another spring, being the punchiest and most effective) can lead to an unbalanced narrative where certain coming-of-age touchstones are emphasized over others that deserve more attention. But together, Melliti and Herzi find a rare alchemy between actor and director telling someone else’s story, but one that may turn out to be a bit of each other’s own.
Grade: B-
“The Little Sister” premiered in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. Mk2 Films handles sales.
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