الحب (El Houb) is the Arabic word for "love." It's also the title of a Moroccan-Dutch film that came out a few months ago about a young man, Karim Zahwani, caught in bed with another man by his father. The discovery breaks the resistance Karim has long struggled with to come out to his mother and father, partly to free himself of the prison of silence he has been living in, partly to get them to stop nagging him to get married. To say it doesn't go well would be an Olympic-sized understatement. By the time the Zahwani family even begins to come to terms with their son's homosexuality, Karim has holed up in a closet, turned off the water and the electricity and even trashed their apartment. "Knock down drag out" doesn't begin to tell the story.
El Houb is not an easy watch. To start with, if one has lived in Europe or America or in most places in the modern world where homosexuality is now old hat as a topic, one has to go back to a time when LGBT people lived closeted lives of hypocrisy or deception. The obvious question that comes to mind is why should we waste our time with yet another coming-out story? "Been there, done that, didn't like it, moved on."
The answer is that along with the fact that, come January 1, 2024, Estonia will be the 34th nation to recognize same-sex marriage is the equally salient fact that it is still illegal in 35 countries, including every one of the Islamic states. That includes Morocco, the country of origin of the immigrant Zahwani family now living in the Netherlands. Karim's mother has two major concerns: what will the neighbors think? And how can her son possibly want to do such a haram thing?
I have to admit I was tempted to shut the film down several times. The Sturm und Drang gets seriously heavy and you want to throw things at the screen each time you see a face twisted in agony over the struggle both sides are going through. If Karim were clear-headed on the subject and it were just a question of getting his mother and father over the hump, it would be a lot easier. But a great deal of the agony is watching Karim struggle with his own doubts.
What made me stick with the histrionics - and that's an appropriate term here - was my lifelong interest in what happens when cultures clash. And the knowledge that the actor, Fahd Larhzaoui, who plays Karim, is himself a gay man of Moroccan origin born in the Netherlands. The story will no doubt frustrate you with its surfeit of homophobia, much of it self-imposed. But only if you fail to recognize that it is also, ultimately, a tale of homophobic Moroccans coming to embrace the modern values of their adopted country, and their gay son in the process.
Seen in that light, it's a nice little contribution to the long slow slog toward gay liberation. Belgian-born Lubna Azabal, of Moroccan origin, plays the mother. Slimane Dazi, a French actor of Algerian origin plays the father (and he apparently had to work hard to learn Moroccan Arabic to get the role). They are both superb, as is the kid who plays Karim as a boy in the flashbacks.
I watched it on Amazon Prime, but I believe it's also available online at:
No comments:
Post a Comment