An experimental anomaly on the Tunisian film front, writer-director Ala Eddine Slim has won a following with two films that leave logic and realism behind to chart a muddy course through the minefield of experimental-apocalyptic narrative. Although their meaning is hard to grasp (perhaps on purpose?), they have attracted attention. After Eddine Slim’s first feature The Last of Us was shown in New Directors, New Films in New York, his new but cut-from-the-same-cloth Tlamess turned up in Cannes’ Directors' Fortnight. Wherever these enigmatic, schematic and often pretentious works are shown, their basic lack of dramatic truth haunts them and they ...
Tunisian director Ala Eddine Slim’s 2016 debut “The Last of Us” garnered a certain cult following after its Venice premiere thanks to the film’s intriguing, at times mesmeric images in which the lead literally fades into his environment. With his followup “Tlamess,” the filmmaker initially appears to be charting new paths until about one-quarter in, when he returns to the idea of a loner becoming one with his surroundings. The concern isn’t the sense of déjà vu — viewers enthralled by the first might be just as happy to re-engage with Slim’s singular vision — so much as his problematic approach to the female character, relegated to being merely a vessel made superfluous once her biological function is over. The conceit is troubling no matter how the opaque scenes are read, making “Tlamess” (the word means an enchantress’ spell as well as something inexplicable) a difficult sell outside avant-garde-leaning festivals.
- 6/2/2019
- by Jay Weissberg
- Variety Film + TV
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