This feature film opens with “stars”, the “Earth”, and the “comet”, all conjured into existence on the screen by the words – and by an audible click of the fingers – from the film’s narrator Najoua (Sanya Sridi). She is a dreamy girl with Down’s syndrome, and her control over this narrative – which she expressly calls The Baronesses – guarantees that the ensuing story, for all that it is localised to contemporary Molenbeek in Brussels, comes with cosmic and even fairytale touches. This may be a grounded story, but it also comes with a magical realist side, as when one character’s search through a computer is figured as her literally crawling in between its circuitboards, or when a domestic argument is expressed through dance, or when someone is swallowed by a sofa, or when the crew actually appears on screen shooting the film.
When Fatima (Saadia Bentaïeb) learns that her husband of 50 years Ahmed (Medhi Zellama) has acquired a second wife and two sons behind her back, she is struck with an idea – like a comet plummeted through the roof – to return to her teen passion of acting before marriage brought it to an end. So she recruits her friends Meriem, Romaïssa and Inès (Rachida Bouganhem, Halima Amrani, Rachida Riahi) , all working-class sexagenarian Muslim women like herself, to join the cast of an unconventional production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and promises young Najoua an invented role that will allow her to fly over the stage. As these five women prepare – with help from lonely, kindly old Lucien (Jan Decleir) whom Meriem secretly fancies – a drama involving a ghost, a play-within-a-play and dark revenge, they attract attention, some unwanted and some more welcome, from a right-winged politician, the media, and the Royal Theatre.
Nabil Ben Yadir’s feature debt was The Barons back in 2009, a film about three young male Muslim slackers in modern-day Brussels. Now, 16 years later, he and his mother Mokhtaria Badaoui co-direct and (with Stéphand Malandrin) co-write a feature boasting a re-gendered title about a quartet of shawled grandmothers who suddenly take to the stage. “What’s good about theatre is that everything is possible,” declares Lucien – and sure enough these women appropriate a myth that they make all their own, even as they uncover something rotten in the Kingdom of Belgium, and as Fatima’s Hamlet-like hesitancy in the face of her husband’s betrayal slowly turns to action.
Meanwhile the female characters occupy a meta-theatrical space where they all seem aware that they are in a movie – and expressly a Belgian one – and even if this is a tragedy, perhaps heartbreak and even death need not be the end. This is a vibrant, vital tale about characters marginalised by their age, sex and ethnicity and made to feel “invisible” – indeed characters who under normal circumstances are only rarely seen on the screen, and practically never elevated to its centre.
Les Baronesses premiered in the Rebels with a Cause section of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, where this piece was originally written. Also showing at REC Tarragona.
