An experimental therapy doc in the tradition of The Act of Killing, Dick Johnson is Dead, Procession, and—to cite the master of the subgenre—Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, Four Daughters focuses on Olfa Hamrouni, a middle-aged Tunisian woman, and her grown children. After the 2016 disappearance of Olfa’s two older daughters, who appeared to have fled to Libya to fight for the Islamic State, Olfa and her two remaining daughters—Eya and Tayssir—collaborated with director Kaouther Ben Hania to explore their family story.
Sometimes this is done via traditional, on-camera interviews, but in other cases Ben Hania recreates scenes from the family’s past, with actors occasionally playing the parts of Olfa and the two oldest siblings. The more avant-garde this becomes, the more interesting—aesthetically and thematically—Four Daughters is. Consider the scene in which when we watch Hind Sabri, the actor playing Olfa, speaking to herself in character to a mirror, discussing her decision to leave her husband. At the same time, we hear the actual Olfa saying the same words, adding intriguing layers of distance and identity.
It becomes clear early on that Islamic radicalization is only a part of this family’s story. From a wider vantage point, Four Daughters reveals the way a toxic mix of sexual aggression and sexual repression has haunted Olfa throughout her life, from her youth as a self-described tomboy who would defend her own mother and sisters from men trying to force their way into her fatherless home to her later sexual frankness—with both her husband and an eventual lover—to her abusively puritanical attitude toward her daughters’ bodies and sexuality. Olfa is a forceful, maddeningly contradictory figure, one whom Four Daughters never seems able to pin down. (Maybe Ben Hania, an Oscar nominee for her 2020 drama The Man Who Sold His Skin, didn’t want to pin her.) For all the recreations—including a harrowingly violent one of her wedding night and others dramatizing the beatings Olfa gave her daughters—there are still gaps in the story, a sense that even as Olfa is being exposed, she’s still keeping something from the camera.
What ultimately matters with a project like this, of course, is how the participants experience it. This, too, is tricky when it comes to Four Daughters. Unlike Procession—in which the men revisiting their experience of sexual abuse as boys express obvious catharsis—we’re not sure where Olfa’s family stands at the end of the film. Olfa remains a slippery figure—unreconciled to her past or herself—while the two younger daughters seem a bit split. Eya appears grateful, if tentative, about having the movie as a mediator of sorts, while Tayssir—the youngest, who was not yet 10 when many of the recreated events took place—seems a bit stunned, perhaps processing, in real time, family truths she hadn’t faced before. She’s not uncomfortable on the camera, but she’s quiet, contemplative, cautious. For all the faces—fictional and otherwise—we meet in Four Daughters, it’s hers I’ll remember most.
(11/26/2023)
