Une histoire d'amour et de désir is a French-language film by the Tunisian director and screenwriter Leyla Bouzid. The film follows Ahmed, a Frenchman born to Algerian immigrants in Paris' working-class suburbs, to the Sorbonne, where he is beginning his studies of literature on a scholarship. There he meets Farah, a young Tunisian woman who is in several classes with him, including one on Arabic erotic literature.
A mutual attraction quickly develops between Ahmed and Farah, but the blossoming relationship runs into the obstacle of their differing personalities and cultural values. Ahmed is shy and traditional, sufficiently scandalized by the erotic literature whose existence he was hitherto unaware of to look into changing classes. Farah is outgoing and fun-loving, easily mixing with the other students at the Sorbonne while Ahmed struggles to fit in. She directly pursues her interest in Ahmed, but he hesitates, held back by his timidity, lack of experience, and reluctance to violate the rules around romance maintained by the relatively traditional Muslim community that he grew up in.
Leyla Bouzid does an especially effective job of capturing Ahmed's nervous discomfort around the less-inhibited Farah, who openly discusses men and sex with a girlfriend and indulges the French boys who chat her up in cafés or on street corners. Bouzid's direction is confident and skillful, featuring lots of striking shots and sequences along with a soundtrack that fits the film perfectly, and Zbeida Belhajamor's performance as Farah captivates in a way that makes it easy to understand Ahmed's attraction to her.
The film deftly examines Ahmed's struggle to deal with the conflict between the traditional values he grew up with and the cosmopolitan and liberal university environment he has entered, as well as the fraught experience of overcoming one's inhibitions to find love. (And as a bonus, the romantic scenes take on an extra charge difficult to find in other modern films thanks to their transgression of the traditional norms that have thus far governed Ahmed's life.) Une histoire d'amour et de désir is an intelligent and touching film that takes on complex subjects with nuance and empathy.
