Salvation Army Review by Alberto Fernández Carbajal

09 October '14

Salvation Army (2013) Film Review

 

Alberto Fernández Carbajal is Leverhulme Fellow at the School of English, University of Leicester, where he is currently working on a new project entitled Queer Diasporas: Islam, Homosexuality and a Micropolitics of Dissent, exploring representations of queer Muslims in international fiction and film.

Salvation Army, 2013 (4)

Salvation Army (2013) is a feature film written and directed by Moroccan author Abdellah Taïa; it is based on the eponymous semi-autobiographical novel first published in 2006 and later translated into English from the French original by Semiotext(e). A Swiss-Moroccan-French production, the film was projected as part of Safar: The Festival of Popular Arab Cinema, hosted at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. This is the début film of a writer who, incidentally, happens to be the first Moroccan author to ‘come out’ publicly. Quite a few of Taïa’s novels are semi-autobiographical portrayals of his experience as a queer citizen in Morocco and, later, in Europe. Since I discovered Taïa’s fiction last year and included it in my new research project, I’ve been wondering what his film would be like. Taïa’s novels are clearly committed to the representation of publicly forbidden queer desires while being, at the same time, exquisitely intimate portrayals of individual stories; as such, they’re honest yet unaggressive, potentially controversial yet deeply unapologetic. So much of the success of Taïa’s fiction depends on the sensitivity of his narrative voice, on the quiet emotion and comedy of some of its episodes, that I wondered how well this light literary touch would translate to the screen. I find that his quietist humour and non-cloying sentimentality translates very well to his naturalist, almost nouvelle-vague style of film-making.

A slowly-paced film characterised by its long expository shots, Salvation Army deals with the sexual awakening and coming of age of its central character, Abdellah, moulded on Taïa himself: as a pubescent boy in a humble neighbourhood in Salé, a small town outside Rabat, in the first section of the film; as a young man in the same enclave ten years later, in the second; and as a university student in Geneva in the film’s final, bleaker section. As Taïa mentioned in the written introduction he sent to the festival organisers due to his absence, this is a film ‘of few words and long silences’, a rather accurate description. At the very opening of the film, in which, curiously, the first thing we see as an audience is a pressure cooker whistling away unattended (is this a symbol for the bottled-up themes the film is about to unleash on us?) young Abdellah silently breaks into someone’s room; he touches the bed-sheets where somebody has been, lies down on them, embraces them. Without any words, Taïa’s directing has told us that this is a boy infatuated with another person – his older brother, as we soon find out. The moving affection with which the young boy treats the young man’s personal effects doesn’t turn their relationship into sinful incest, or Abdellah’s desire into forbidden homosexuality. The film refuses to pass comment: it simply points to the naturalness with which the boy is going about the expression of his innermost affections. In scenes such as this, in which feelings are implied rather than expressed, the film translates most productively the understated and unapologetic tone of Taïa’s fiction.

Salvation Army, 2013 (2)

The film deals as unashamedly with the theme of pederasty, that is, with adult men’s sexual initiation of younger males. There is a long tradition in Arab poetry of homoerotic writing addressed by an adult male poet to a younger male lover. This male-to-male erotic poetry was first censored by the European imperialists, with their onslaught against homosexuality arising in the nineteenth-century, and it has since been disavowed by Islamic conservatism. The film’s candid representation of several fully grown men ‘grooming’ a young male seems willing to tickle contemporary paedophilia-obsessed sensibilities. The film’s tone, however, strips this topic of its alleged controversy; instead, it shows how the young Abdellah often sought the company of these older men, perhaps even saw them as vehicles for the expression of those pent-up feelings he had to suppress at home with his family, who remain neutral about his sexual orientation, unlike their real and ‘autofictional’ counterparts in Mon Maroc, Le rouge du tarbouche and the eponymous Salvation Army. In fact, there’s a slightly comedic scene in which Abdellah is playing ‘loves me, loves me not’ with some flowers in the family’s tiny whitewashed backyard, all in the unsuspected presence of his father; the boy’s use of the male pronoun doesn’t seem to affect the older man, who has a simple affective bond with his son, who often stands in the domestic war between his parents, triggered by his father’s violent treatment of his wife.

Being an in-betweener is the character’s main role in the film: he’s placed between his father and his mother, between the white older man from Switzerland who becomes his lover and the Moroccan boatman who tries to profit financially from their unequal relationship; most generally, he’s placed between Geneva and Salé, between the world of alleged sexual liberation offered by Europe and the ambivalent spaces of his native Morocco, the latter being torn between the clandestine permissiveness of queer desires and the potential punishment of ‘sodomy’. We’re reminded of the punishable nature of sexual ‘deviance’ by the troubling scene in which Abdellah is thrown stones from a faceless window by an anonymous attacker. After dropping his tray of flatbreads, Abdellah looks around in defiance, saying that he’s not afraid, but the identity of the stone-thrower is not revealed: the menace of homophobia is hence a lingering presence in the film, a faceless but palpable threat to those people who dare to challenge patriarchal sexual conformity.

Salvation Army, 2013 (1)

The film’s carefully deployed ambivalence doesn’t mean that it never takes sides or that it doesn’t contain moments of serious critique. Unlike the novel, in which there’s only a very fleeting encounter between Abdellah and his former European lover once he’s moved to Europe, there are intimations in the film of a deeper political commentary: the white man accidentally comes across Abdellah and then chooses to confront him directly about his lack of communication about his movements. After cross-questioning Abdellah about his personal motives to cut him off, he tells him, plainly, that he’s ‘changed’. Ironically, the white man, who doesn’t elicit from Abdellah the submissive response he wanted, then complains he has been ‘used’; he tells the young Moroccan that he’s planned all along to use him to facilitate his enrolment at a European university. He explicitly calls Abdellah a ‘whore’. Incensed, the young man sarcastically foregrounds the stereotype used against him, saying he is a whore, but the truth finally comes out: he’s fled without telling him because he needed to be free from Morocco (the common plight of the queer migrant); he also needed to be free of his white lover, a statement of ethnic defiance that earns him a slap. What the film is undertaking here much more explicitly than the novel it’s based on is a critique of the white man’s sexual objectification of the Moroccan boy, in an episode that rings with residual anti-colonial insurgency, and that resonates with the earlier assessment of  French as the language of the ‘rich’. The world where he’s trying to prosper as a young man is that of the former colonisers, where Arabs are still taken advantage of and suspected; a world that offers, on the other hand, a seemingly more tolerant space in which to be a homosexual, at a remove from the conservative influence of Islamic patriarchy. That said, faith doesn’t seem to feature much in the film, although, in a tell-tale moment, a random stranger who chooses to sit next to Abdellah can’t guess his nationality – tells him, finally, that he doesn’t look Moroccan – but says he knows for a fact he’s a ‘Muslim’. This is the only time in the film in which Abdellah’s identity is discussed in religious terms. It’s hard to know whether the film takes its own topic to be beyond religion, or whether Islam is deemed an indelible, unspoken element in the narrative, Abdellah’s both literal and figurative journey being regarded as part of the ‘struggle’ of each Muslim to find his/her identity in a globalised world.

As far as Western perceptions of Muslims is concerned, the title of the film helps ironize the anti-Islamic instincts of most of our contemporary Western world. ‘Salvation Army’ (from the French L’armée du Salut) doesn’t refer to a legion of blood-thirsty Islamic extremists trying to force the mistakenly named ‘religion of the sword’ onto a frightened secularist West, as a media-driven audience might expect from a film penned by a Muslim North-African. On the contrary, the title refers to the famous Christian charity giving shelter to homeless people, and in whose Swiss headquarters Abdellah is staying, in almost total destitution, while waiting to receive his University scholarship. With its word-play, the film demonstrates that a narrative about Muslims can challenge the West’s preconceptions of the life of such citizens and of their relationship with their faith, their culture, and even their sexuality.

Salvation Army, 2013 (3)

The film’s final scene contains an indirect reference to its main cinematic intertext, a homage to Egyptian film, the national genre that, according to Taïa’s introduction, made him fall in love with cinema. At the film’s closing, Abdellah offers to share an orange – his favourite fruit, as he stated in the novel – with his new roommate, Mohamed, a Moroccan man from Meknes. Before he does so, as a token of thanks, Mohamed offers to sing a song, and launches into an unaccompanied rendition of ‘Ana Lak Ala Toul’, the Arabic song by Abdel Halim Hafez performed in the black-and-white film Abdellah used to watch on TV with his family back in Morocco. Abdellah is moved to tears by his countryman’s simple but heartfelt performance, whose last line sings: ‘I miss you and your eyes; I don’t know where to escape from you.’ Indeed, for Abdellah, as well as for his real-life counterpart, Taïa himself, there is no escape from his lover’s memory or, even more so, from the memories of his native Morocco, which the song brings back to him most vividly.

Salvation Army’s abrupt cut to the silent credits, once the song is over, isn’t merely the symptom of a low-key, financially modest international production by a first-time director, but serves, instead, as a blunt reminder of the film’s serious attempt at representing in a naturalist manner the arduous realities of North-African citizens in the West, the queer diasporas they undertake from their allegedly conservative countries to a not too welcoming ‘liberal’ Europe. As Safar’s writer-in-residence Malu Halasa suggests in her blog, ‘[n]uanced and intriguing, the movie Salvation Army captures the difficult emotions of a young, gay Morocco man looking for survival and a way of escaping the strictures of social prejudice in his country.’ It also makes quite patent Taïa’s persistent emotional bond to his native country, augmented by his on-going self-imposed exile in France. The view of Morocco Salvation Army offers us is rosier than that in the novel; its view of Switzerland, greyer – yet its appealing naturalist tone, suffused with moments of quiet humour and unsentimental pathos, translates to perfection from page to screen its author’s uncomplicated way of exploring complex issues. This is a film that, due to its lack of a too overtly political agenda, would rather seduce than preach at its audience, and so its sensitive stance has the power to speak directly to the heart.

Salvation Army was screened as part of Safar: The Festival of Popular Arab Cinema on Tuesday 23 September 2014 at the ICA, London.

The Arab British Centre would like to take this opportunity to thank Alberto for kindly writing this fantastic review on the film.