Review: An immigrant family struggles to communicate in the beautiful French film ‘Fatima’

Parents who emigrate for the sake of their children are often making a devil’s bargain they’re not aware of. Freedom and opportunity are doubtless there for sons and daughters, but the hidden cost can be a demoralizing social and cultural gap between the generations, a distance the insightful “Fatima” beautifully investigates.

Finely directed by France’s Philippe Faucon, whose films do not regularly get American distribution, and running a focused 79 minutes, “Fatima” was the surprise winner of that country’s 2016 Cesar for best picture (besting such favorites as Arnaud Desplechin’s “My Golden Years” and the Oscar-nominated “Mustang”) as well as Cesars for adapted screenplay and most promising actress for Zita Hanrot.

Part of the reason for “Fatima’s” victory was no doubt its timeliness, with immigration and its attendant anxieties being very much the issue of the moment worldwide.

But “Fatima” is noteworthy not because of its subject matter but because of the skill with which it’s been adapted by writer-director Faucon, who loosely based his script on “Prayer to the Moon,” a collection of poems and musings by an émigré named Fatima Elayoubi.

Faucon, whose own grandparents came to France without speaking the language, has a gift for artfully removing the melodrama from potentially overheated situations, leaving behind a scenario that is honest, direct and dramatic without any sense of special pleading or situations pushed too hard.

The Fatima of the title (well-played by non-professional Soria Zeroual) is a woman who immigrated to the Lyon area from Algeria. Divorced from her husband, she lives only for her two teenage daughters and the menial work as a part-time cleaner that makes their life in France and her dreams for their future possible.

The two sisters could not be more different. Eighteen-year old-Nesrine (Cesar winner Hanrot) is serious and studious, determined to let nothing get in her way as she begins the first of seven grueling years in medical school.

Her younger sibling, 15-year-old Souad (Kenza Noah Aiche), is fierce and rebellious, given to flirting with random guys on public transportation and, though she hides it from her mother as well as she can, not doing well in school at all.

We meet this trio in “Fatima’s” opening vignette, where, accompanied by her sister and her mother, Nesrine and a friend are trying to rent an apartment near the medical school. But when the landlord sees Fatima in a head scarf, the possibility evaporates.

Giving Fatima a hard time about this and about everything in general, is Souad, who resents her mother’s menial existence, bitingly calling her “a living rag” and saying things like, “I’m sick of this stupid life.”

Though Nesrine is much more respectful, her life has problems as well. She’s worried that the cost of her education will be too much for her divorced parents, worried that she can’t keep up with the school’s demanding workload, worried about the responsibility she feels to succeed at all costs.

Fatima, who would do anything to help, finds that there are barriers. Her French is imperfect, as is her knowledge of the country’s customs and laws. That leaves her children, as she is painfully aware, almost hermetically sealed away from her in a universe she cannot access.

The mother’s only consolation is her notebook, in which she writes her thoughts in lyrical Arabic that is a world away from her rudimentary French.

Though this may sound schematic, “Fatima” surprises you at every turn as all three women deal with the worry born of immigration that pervades each of their lives.

For one thing, the French bureaucracy, from the people who give remedial language classes to the medical establishment, are not the devils usually seen on screen but people genuinely trying to help.

And one of the biggest problems Fatima and her daughters face is not from xenophobic natives but from fellow immigrants who seem jealous of the small success the little family has achieved.

Low key though it is, “Fatima” has moments of real and lasting drama as well as the conviction that these stories have value. Though it may be an axiom of cinema, as director Faucon says in an interview, that “a falling tree makes more noise than a growing forest,” in this film he intended to “tell the story of the growing forest” and show just how dramatic that can be.

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‘Fatima’

Not rated

In French and Arabic.

Running time: 1 hour, 19 minutes

Playing: Laemmle’s Royal, West Los Angeles

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