A tense emotional bloodletting, “A Son (Un Fils)” opens on a deceptively peaceful note. A group of men and women on the younger side of middle age have gathered together for a picnic, perhaps for a celebration. Convening in a pretty spot under a canopy of trees, they chatter and raise glasses, laughter and drinks freely flowing as children play nearby. And while the location is unclear, the geographic possibilities narrow when the picnickers speak Arabic with smatterings of French. The smiles keep coming, even when one reveler jokes about an imam and another says they’ll laugh less when the Islamists take over.
Set in the summer of 2011, “A Son” unfolds in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution, though never directly engages with the upheaval. (In January of that year, after mass protests, the authoritarian president fled the country, leading to the creation of a new government.) Instead, the writer-director Mehdi M. Barsaoui takes fairly oblique approach to the country’s turmoil. Without waving flags or voicing explicit politics, he emphasizes faces and feelings and specifically what happens when one of the families at the picnic — this joyous gathering, with its laughter and bare heads, contemporary clothing and ties to the modern world — blunders into a violent Islamist ambush.
Fares (Sami Bouajila) and Meriem (Najla Ben Abdallah), a sexy, attractive, warmly affectionate couple, are first seen driving to the picnic in a Range Rover. Sometime later, they and their 11-year-old son, Aziz (Youssef Khemiri), are on the road again, this time headed south on a business trip for Fares. Their destination is Tataouine, a location bounded by desert and a few hours from Libya, then in the midst of civil war. There, the family checks into a luxury hotel, and you wait for the worst.
It arrives shortly thereafter with narrative economy, gunfire blasts and a shock of visceral terror. One minute the family is singing along to a pop tune; an eye-blink later, Fares is racing down the road in reverse with shattered windows and a severely wounded Aziz, and you’re abruptly watching a new movie. Fares and Meriem rush him to a hospital, where Barsaoui begins thwarting your assumptions about what to expect. And as the tone, vibe and storytelling parts shift and shift again — the movie is by turns a hospital drama, a marriage melodrama, a black-market intrigue — Meriem and especially Fares draw you near, push you away and prompt you to choose sides.
Barsaoui folds in a lot of narrative turns in the compressed time frame and in the cramped spaces of the main locale, the rundown regional hospital where Fares and Meriem worriedly wait as doctors tend to Aziz. Although the focus remains on the parents, their anguished faces and blood-soaked clothing, Barsaoui takes laps around the rest of the hospital, where watchful women in head scarves also wait. The silence of these other visitors — some accompanied, others alone — thickens meaningfully as Fares and Meriem’s relationship is tested and their voices grow louder, angrier. What, Barsaoui seems to ask, do these other women — emissaries from another Tunisia that Fares and Meriem share but don’t inhabit — think, hope and want?
What Barsaoui wants is for you to notice these women and see how they look at this couple, who rarely return their gaze, a blinkeredness that’s understandable if also revealing. If this were a certain kind of European art film, Fares and Meriem might be punished for living in a bourgeois, secular echo chamber. But Barsaoui doesn’t brutalize his characters, even when he shows them (and you) the depths of human depravity. Their child may be dying and their marriage might be too, and that is pain enough. But there’s more to life than one’s own sorrow, as Barsaoui underscores with another child, an unloved boy who enters late and brings the horrors of the larger world with him.
A Son (Un Fils)
Not rated. In French and Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters.
