A young man, looking for orientation in his life: Hakim (Lotfi Abdelli) is a scuba diver, living in an old lighthouse with his brother, the very strict and orderly Issa, somewhere in the Tunisian south. Having just lost his sister Leila through suicide, Hakim's world seems to be breaking apart, leaving him behind with a profound feeling of loss and guilt for not having been able to prevent his sister's death.
With his first feature film, Nidhal Chatta presents a beautifully shot road movie about a young man's quest for identity in a no man's land between the ocean and the desert, both of these territories evoking death. Trying to come to terms with his life, Hakim is haunted by images of his sister floating in the depths of the sea. Amazing underwater shots intrude into his interior world, a world where reality and imagination, past and present, the here and now and the hereafter are not clearly separated any more, and where images turn into a monochrome blue, colour of longing, of melancholy, grief and loss. In a first person voice over narration, a deep reflection on Hakim's state of mind, we learn about his feelings, which openly contradict his violent and aggressive attitude towards his surrounding.
It is only upon getting to know Aicha (Yasmine Bahri), a young girl having grown up in Europe, that Hakim is brought back to life, but only to discover that very soon, he will once again have to say goodbye to a person he loves. Due to a serious illness, Aicha has come back to the country of her ancestors to meet a well-known marabout, even though she does not really believe in his powers. Being a photographer, she tries to capture what is left of her life with an old polaroid camera, to save moments soon to be gone.
Having accepted a job offered to him by Aicha's uncle Ferid, head of the local mafia, Hakim decides to quit his former life and to leave behind everything that reminds him of Leila. But what follows is just another confrontation with death. On his way to the oasis of Tozeur he once again meets Aicha, who is on her passage from life to death, which leads her trough the desert painted in a sickly shade of yellow. On the girl's way to her final destination, Chatta ironically quotes Greek mythology as well as Jean Cocteau's „Orphée", replacing the apocalyptic riders on their motorbikes by Hakim's brother on a rusty scooter, leading her over the Styx, its warden being a builder having a nap in a hand barrow.
„No Man's Love"is like a deep breath of fresh air: only rarely in the last few years has a Tunisian film taken such a new, undisguised look on its protagonists, on a young generation in crisis, looking for freedom, for a sense in life, for a reason to exist, to live and to love. Being completely free of false exotic embellishment or ornamentation, „No Man's Love"speaks of marginalized, alienated beings, living at the edges of society, struggling with tradition and destiny, looking for orientation in a world that is not always their own, where love only exists for a short period of time and, in the here and now, is not made to last. The poetry of its tone and its photography, its compelling actors and the newness of its style turn this work into one of the rare diamonds in recent Tunisian cinema.
Sarah Mersch
