Review of The Source (2011) by Pj P — 20 Aug 2012

â~La Source des femmesâ(TM) is a Fairy Story; tales from the Arabian Nights for the telecommunication age set in an unnamed Maghrebi or Middle Eastern Country which has been freed in living memory from an unnamed colonial power. It is a pity that so many critics missed this point, made explicit at the beginning of the film and reinforced by the heroine reading tales from the Arabian Nights aloud in movie. It is long, it sometimes seems a bit confused and maybe a little more editing would have done it some good, but this is a minor crib.

The â~sourceâ(TM) is here French not English and is the spring, indeed the Arab spring, from which the women of the village draw water, trudging uphill to it and wearily stumbling down again laden with buckets of water. At the beginning of the film one of the women, who is pregnant, slips and miscarries. This has happened to the women time after time over the years.

Leila (Leïla Bekhti) is happily married to the schoolmaster, the villageâ(TM)s only intellectual. It is not clear if she has read Aristophanes but she uses Lysistrataâ(TM)s method and the women embark on a â~love strikeâ(TM). This is not to deter the men of the village from going to war: once warriors who fought the colonialists and other tribes, now they sit around all day and drink tea. They do nothing at all and there will be no sex for the men until they do something to secure a water supply.

It may be that this affirmation of a liberal Islamic culture which is not in conflict with the sexuality of Arab women (overtly portrayed here as some of the women have the same reluctance to abstain from sex as Lysistrataâ(TM)s women) owes more to Western interpretation, Western preferences, than to any identifiable original Arab impulse. Director Radu Mihaileanu is Romanian by birth and French by location; Luc Besson is among the producers. The doyen of Leilaâ(TM)s supporter, gnarled and hardy, Le Vieux Fusil, gloriously seen cursing her donkey as it takes her away from a good signal on her mobile, believes her son to be a respectable construction worker. In fact he has become a fundamentalist imam who believes that women should cover their faces â" as alien to her culture as it once was (we should remember) to women in Kabul or Tehran. Le Vieux Fusil (played by the Algerian performer Biyouna) gives her son a severe bollocking and sends him on his way. When the women are summoned before the village imam, Leila persuades this kindly, reasonable old man of the justice of their cause with numerous references to the Koran.

Ah, if it were really often thus, eh? Even so, â~La Source des femmesâ(TM) provides us (even old atheists like me) with a reminder that Islam has been, can be, a religion which is in no way antipathetic to joy, to love, and most of all to women. But much more than that, it is witty, it is gorgeously filmed, and it is a cracking colourful tale about men and women. And, Oh yes, everybody is very happy when the problem is resolved and the â~love strikeâ(TM) can, er, be called off.