Un été à La Goulette (1996)

User Rating:

6.5/10   

Director:

Férid Boughedir

Writers:

Férid Boughedir (writer)
Nouri Bouzid (writer)

Release Date:

25 July 1996 (Netherlands)

Genre:

Comedy | Drama

Plot:

Summer, 1967. La Goulette, the touristic beach of Tunisi, is the site where three nice seventeen-year-old girls live: Gigi...

Plot Keywords:

Girl | Moral | 1960s | Muslim | Sexuality

Awards:

3 nominations

Cast

Sonia Mankaï	...	Meriem
Ava Cohen-Jonathan	...	Tina
Sarah Pariente	...	Gigi
Mustapha Adouani	...	Youssef
Guy Nataf	...	Jojo
Ivo Salerno	...	Giuseppe
Gamil Ratib	...	Hadj Beji
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Cybelle Agha	...	Mery Glass
Fatima Ben Saïdane	...	Taita
Hatem Berrabeh	...	Salvatore
Michel Boujenah	...	Himself
Claudia Cardinale	...	Herself
Hélène Catzaras	...	Lucia
Mohammed Driss	...	Miró
Tarak Harbi	...	Hamouda
Amel Hedhili	...	Wassila
Michael Journo	...	Jacky
David Liscia	...	Maxo 'Delon'
Radhouane Meddeb	...	Vénus
Mouna Noureddine	...	La dame coquette
Jamel Sassi	...	Tewfik
Lisa Seror	...	Fritna

Also Known As:

A Summer in La Goulette (USA)
Halk-el-wad (Tunisia: Arabic title)

Runtime:

100 min

Country:

Tunisia | France | Belgium

Language:

French | Arabic | Italian

Color:

Color

Certification:

Iceland:L | Finland:S | Norway:11 | Spain:7 | Sweden:7

Company:

Canal+

Easygoing film, with challenging elements

When we're told at the end that the Arab-Israeli war started a day after the film's last scene, the transience of what we've been watching is underlined - we realize (if we haven't already) that the summer of the title is a figurative as well as a literal setting. The film is in part a largely timeless evocation of eroticism, incident and youthful entanglements, but with a highly specific undertone of racial bickering - it's a melting pot of religious and ethnic allegiances which seems in danger of blowing (the main confrontations here revolving around sex). As so often, it's mainly the men who perpetrate the worst excesses of tribalism, with the women more conciliatory, more progressive (the film sums up the tensions impinging on the younger women through its discussion, later implemented, of going naked under the veil - adhering to tradition while eroticizing, indeed scandalizing it). Despite these challenging elements, it's an episodic, easygoing film, with a languid, glistening sexiness that sometimes has a distinctly dangerous charge; in the end though it fades away rather, despite the political underlining of the closing caption.