"Satin Rouge"

Middle-aged mom turns belly dancer in this Tunisian delight, a sweet and sexy celebration of real women's real bodies.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Aug 30, 2002 | "Satin Rouge," the debut feature of Tunisian-born filmmaker Raja Amari, has already received -- and will continue to receive -- attention because it's a movie set in an Arab country that deals directly with the sexual experiences of a middle-aged woman. And it's easy to see why, particularly at this juncture in history, audiences would be interested in its relevance as a sociopolitical snapshot of attitudes toward women in Islamic countries.

And yet all politics start with the skin we're in, and Amari, to her great credit as a filmmaker, understands that. "Satin Rouge" is only partly a movie about the misogyny of certain Islamic cultures. (Even if Islam as a religion doesn't necessarily preach misogyny, if one of its cultural interpretations is that a woman should be sentenced to death by stoning for having a child out of wedlock, there's no other word to use.) "Satin Rouge" is mostly about the experience of one aging woman that reflects, to some degree, the feelings of aging women everywhere.

Even the most progressive of moviegoers -- maybe especially them -- tend to watch movies made by non-Westerners from behind a comfortably thick window: There's often something self-congratulatory about the way We (Westerners) watch movies about Them (everyone else) with the sense that we're well on the road to a deeper understanding of other cultures. But "Satin Rouge" works on another level altogether. Its "us" and "them" aren't divided so easily along cultural and political boundaries. In this film, the most complex and difficult boundaries are the nebulous air space between men and women, and the stealthy passage of time that all of a sudden, without our realizing it, separates our youth from our old age.

That's not to say "Satin Rouge" is an apolitical picture. You can't watch it and not be aware of the political implications: In the movie, Lilia (played by Hiyam Abbas) is a 40-ish widow whose face is lovely, if a bit careworn, and whose body has taken on the curvy, ripe-fruit weightiness of middle age. She's devoted to her sullen, rebellious but basically decent teenage daughter Selma (Hend El Fahem) and to keeping their small apartment beyond tidy. Suspecting that her daughter is sneaking off to a nearby cabaret, Lilia sneaks off herself to investigate. Her initial feelings of revulsion turn to curiosity and then to fascination, until one night, along with some of the belly dancers she has befriended at the club, she takes the stage herself. Eventually, she even embarks on an affair with one of the men she meets at the club.

Amari, who lives in Paris but returns home to Tunis often, has said that the picture was attacked by the conservative press in North Africa -- surprisingly, less for its forthrightness about sex than for the way it "desecrated" the image of motherhood.

But in terms of the way Amari treats her middle-aged protagonist, "Satin Rouge" would be unusual even among Western movies about women. Anyone who has picked up a magazine in the past 10 years knows that our culture reveres youth, but the upside is that even without plastic surgery, we're all able to stay younger for much longer than we ever have before, thanks to better healthcare and more awareness of the roles diet and exercise (not to mention plain old youthful thinking) can play.

Strangely enough, though, few filmmakers have figured out how to make interesting movies about middle-aged people. We need fewer wretched comedies about 50-year-olds hanging on for dear life to their sexuality ("Never Again") and more pictures like "Sexy Beast," in which the existence of sex past 40 -- or, more specifically, women's attractiveness past 40 -- was never an issue at all. You simply got it, thanks to the way director Jonathan Glazer and cinematographer Ivan Bird captured the essential beauty of lead actress Amanda Redman, with her gently rolling tummy and luminous, lived-in skin.

Amari (who is just 31) approaches both the story and her lead character with a similarly light touch. When we first see Lilia, she's wearing a frumpy cotton wrapper as she dusts, at least once and sometimes twice, every inch of the family apartment. But there's music playing, and she stops briefly in front of the mirror, where, slowly and almost in spite of herself, she begins to dance. You can barely see her rounded outline beneath that rectangular cotton dress -- she's all circles in a world of squares -- but her slow, tentative movements give us a sense of the heart of the woman beneath.

Next Page: Every country, and every culture, has its version of the Big Ol' Gal

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