Time was, “From the executive producer of…” was the least impressive thing you could put on a poster, but now it’s become a handy guide to a film’s style and subject matter. Major directors are lending their imprimatur to films by new or less well-known directors, and it’s telling which projects they’re backing. If you like the dreamy romanticism of Barry Jenkins’s films, you’ll probably like Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, which he executive-produced; similarly, Martin Scorsese has guided moviegoers to the work of Lulu Wang and Joanna Hogg. Now Dina Amer’s debut You Resemble Me, released at cinemas and on streaming platforms by Modern Films, comes with a list of executive producers that would make a pretty good Cannes jury: Spikes Lee and Jonze, Riz Ahmed and Alma Har’el.
It seems like a fairly random list, but there are traces of all these film-makers in Amer’s work: the wounded humanity that lies under Jonze’s prankishness, the truth-through-artifice ethos of Har’el’s Bombay Beach, Lee’s polemical fearlessness. The most interesting name is Ahmed, because on the surface You Resemble Me looks like the kind of film he’s vocally opposed, exploring European Muslim communities through the lens of a sensational media story about a terrorist. The major difference, though, is that this time the media story was not just sensationalised but outright wrong. In her previous career as a journalist, Amer reported on a police raid in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis carried out by police looking for the plotters of the horrific November 2015 attack on the Bataclan. The raid ended with the death of a young woman called Hasna Aït Boulahcen, a death which was reported as the first suicide bombing carried out by a European woman. Except Aït Boulahcen was a victim, not the perpetrator, of the explosion, and now Amer has made a drama informed by 300 hours of interviews depicting what brought her to that fateful point.
You Resemble Me includes some of those interviews at the end, as well as a montage of international news stories illustrating how far that lie about her death travelled before the truth could put its boots on. There are other flourishes. Amer’s portrait of Hasna travels through multiple identities, from her childhood fantasies of being a cowboy to an adult attempt to join the French military, before her final slide into radicalism. After her death, the photographs of three different women were published in various outlets and identified as her. Amer references this by having multiple actresses play her, even deep-faking other people’s faces – including her own – over the lead Mouna Soualem’s face.
During the earlier heyday of films about radicalisation, the worst criticism that could be flung at a film was that it “sympathised with terrorists”. Amer is clearly unafraid of this charge, not least because Hasna wasn’t a terrorist: she was a very troubled, very lost woman, caught between two groups of people who didn’t mind her dying
It’s a device that will garner the film some attention, not least because of the legal and ethical grey area that deep-fakes currently exist in. The surprise is how little this disrupts the drama’s emotional connection. These are, after all, alienation effects – when Berthold Brecht coined the term, he used it to refer to dramatic techniques that broke an audience’s suspension of disbelief in order to get them to focus more deeply on the meaning of a story. Yet the terrible curve of Hasna’s story remains completely absorbing no matter what Amer throws at it. There is a sense of continuity between her youthful thrill when a classmate beats up a white boy for racially abusing her, all the way through to her final affiliation with Islamic State. In between, we see how this circle didn’t need to be closed, as everyone from military recruiters to dubious boyfriends reject Hasna, efficiently shutting her out of mainstream French society.
Anyone who remembers the decade or so following 9/11 will recall quite a lot of films about the radicalisation process, from Hollywood prestige pictures like Rendition to TV movies like Yasmin and Antonia Bird’s still-underrated The Hamburg Cell. The cycle was effectively ended by – Ahmed again – Chris Morris’s Four Lions, whose abandonment of standard liberal good taste probably helped it get much closer to the truth of the matter. You Resemble Me refreshes the radicalisation drama, not so much through Amer’s experimental flourishes, but more through taking stock of how terrorism has changed in the intervening decade-plus. The scenes of Hasna being recruited online are particularly fascinating; it’s rendered as a seduction, with a silky-voiced male jihadist promising Hasna that paradise will be better than her best-ever orgasm. British viewers may see echoes of the grooming of the teenage “IS bride” Shamima Begum in these scenes.
The fact that You Resemble Me is directed by a woman of Egyptian heritage, one whose film’s title underlines her personal investment in Hasna’s story, does a lot to change the formula as well. Even those who don’t understand the appeal of the burkha will recognise the sense of liberation Hasna feels as she wears one for the first time, as well as the just-about-contained rage she feels when a police officer tells her to take it off – the nation of liberté, égalité, fraternité, telling its citizens how to dress themselves. It’s worth asking whether a white or male director could understand this – or whether they’d allow themselves to. During the earlier heyday of films about radicalisation, the worst criticism that could be flung at a film was that it “sympathised with terrorists”. Amer is clearly unafraid of this charge, not least because Hasna wasn’t a terrorist: she was a very troubled, very lost woman, caught between two groups of people – IS and the French police – who didn’t mind her dying. You Resemble Me does a humane and disturbing job of illustrating how she ended up there.
YOU RESEMBLE ME IS IN CINEMAS AND ON DIGITAL 3 FEBRUARY (MODERN FILMS)
