The Source review

Sisters are doing it for themselves!

Watching Radu Mihaileanu’s beautiful new film, The Source is an experience similar to eating a piece of baklava. It is rich, indulgent, layered and a little bit saccharine. I love baklava. I can eat the equivalent of my body weight in the stuff so watching this was no real torment. If you don’t have a sweet tooth however you might not be in for such a treat.

The story is based on the Greek tale of Lysistrata and also A Thousand and One Nights, only moved to a modern day, rural North African village. Here the women have been collecting water from a spring miles up in the hills since the beginning of time. After a fatal accident on one of the trips, the women lead by Leila (Bekhti – A Prophet) decide to go on a love strike, withholding sex from their husbands until they build a pipeline to the village.

It is a gloriously beautiful film and the cinematography makes you drool (although maybe I was just thinking about baklava too much.) The dialogue at times is rather heavy handed and overly metaphorical with women referring to their…ahem…parts, as ovens and tunnels and the like which screams “this was written by a man,” but essentially it is a portrait of the bonds between women and how strong some of them need to be in order to make their lives bearable.

The film seems like a comedy and there are numerous laugh out loud moments in this film, particularly from the superbly acted Old Mother Rifle (Biyouna) a widow who urges the women with Leila not to stray from their mission. However each moment of humour is followed by one of savage cruelty from the sex starved men, and we see first hand just how much these women are risking by embarking on this journey. Rapes, beatings, and even death are threats that loom over their heads and with each second of the film the tension rises and our empathy mounts. I found it very hard not to shout: “you go, sister!” at the screen most of the time especially at the kick butt, final scenes.

What is particularily refreshing though is that although the men are the antagonists they are merely protecting what they believe is right. This is not a film about women vs. Islam, although it really does feel like that at first.

There are times where you feel like you are reading one page of The Daily Mail followed by a page from The Guardian and all of the swaying about does make you feel a bit queasy (perhaps the sugar overload doesn’t help.) But to tell you the truth it really did not bother me. It is a film about education and finding a way to free all people trapped in a world where fundamentalism rules. Mihaileanu reminds us that sadly this is not as easy to do as the film makes out and that this story is all just a fairytale, with Leila as a modern day Scheherazade. Does this detract from it being a powerful story? Hell no! If anything the sugary sweetness emphasises the sour and makes the plight of real women all the more tragic.

Not everyone will like this film as there are faults lying in between its layers. But I was taught that it is our faults that make us beautiful, and this is one heck of a pretty film. Now, pass me the baklava.