If Lilia loses herself, it is because she no longer wants to fight her desires, and that she indulges in her needs. She follows her dream, without rebellion, and her experience at the night-club will enable her to leave her position as a "mother" and become a woman who is looked at and desired. In her journey, she discovers that she has conflicting feelings of desire, love, humiliation and jealousy. . . . Lilia hovers from one world to the other and finally loses touch.

--Raja Amari

A woman briskly, obsessively, dusts the furniture in her apartment. She is beautiful but somewhat severe, dressed plainly in a matronly housecoat. Music plays on the radio. She pauses in front of the mirror, loosens her hair from its constraining clip, and her shoulders begin to move to the music. She is lost for the moment in a trance-like dance, her hips swaying gracefully and seductively, a slight smile animating her face. She turns to face a photograph of a man standing on a dresser, dances before it, then returns to the mirror. The moment passes as quickly as it came, her hair is bound up once again, and her dust rag resumes its work. Raja Amari's first feature film, Satin Rouge, has begun, and its central dynamic has been established.

Lillia is a young widow with a teenage daughter, Salma. Lillia lives a life of boredom, caring for her daughter and their apartment, knitting, sewing, and watching soap operas and romances on television. She receives occasional visits from a neighbor. She frets over Salma, who needs her less and less, and is beginning to live her own life with schoolfriends from wealthier families in the suburbs and a boyfriend in the city. One senses that Lillia holds many hidden talents, but has no avenue to pursue them. She is drifting through life, slowly and silently wasting away.

One day Lillia notices her daughter's special interest in a young man who has been drumming at her traditional dance class, and she follows him to his other place of work, a nearby cabaret. Suspecting that Salma is meeting him when she professes to be studying with a friend (her suspicions, by the way, turn out to be quite perceptive), Lillia returns to the cabaret that evening in order to catch her daughter in her lies. Instead, she finds herself thoroughly rattled by a strange world that she has never before glimpsed: voluptuous belly-dancers in flashy clothing and intoxicating perfume, boldly exposing themselves to the stares and appreciation of the males who frequent the place, women who also display a strangely alluring solidarity and sense of kindness. When she realizes that her daughter isn't there, she finds herself suddenly with no reason to be there, yet no desire to leave; caught in a web of conflicting emotions, she promptly passes out. She awakens with an irrational, fetishistic desire to be part of this world.

Lillia steals away to the cabaret the very next evening. She secretly tries on one of the revealing outfits belonging to her new friend, the chief dancer Folla, and is pressured into dancing with Folla before the men. Tuning out the audience and surrendering herself to the music, it is almost as if she is dancing in front of the mirror again: her beautiful body is one with the music, though her thin, taut face reflects her confusion, tension, and fear. In Cinderella-like manner, she is an immediate sensation, winning the approval of both Folla and the young drummer, Chakri. She proceeds to embark upon a new life, a dangerous and somewhat perverse (to quote the director) double-life, in which she plays the dutiful widow and mother by day and a highly-desired performer by night.

The attempt to keep these two worlds separate creates a great deal of tension for Lillia (a powerfully exciting tension for her) and also for us viewers, as we wait for Lillia to get "caught," for her daughter to find out the real nature of the changes that she senses in her mother, the source of the extra money that is now flowing into the household, the reason that her mother is now starting to relax her hold on her. We fear that Lillia will lose herself in this new world, indulge in behavior that she will come to regret. At the same time, we are happy to see her blossoming, opening up to a new sense of her power as a woman. Like her, we are entranced by the skill and sensuality of the cabaret women, and generally indifferent (or worse) to the men who frequent that world.

This complex, confused response becomes heightened as we see Lillia's growing attraction to young Chakri, her daughter's lover. In part this is due to Lillia's new willingness to recognize and accept her desires; in part it is due to what the director sees as the mother's obsession and identification with her daughter, which is partly what has sent her to the cabaret in the first place: "It is almost as if she was becoming her daughter or taking over her daughter's life."

We begin to see that this film is not taking the easy road of simply showing us a woman's life-affirming celebration of her sensuality. No, something much more psychologically edgy is happening in Satin Rouge. Though this is a very different film, there are aspects of Satin Rouge that remind me of Buñuel's 1967 masterpiece of perversion, Belle de Jour, in which the prim Catherine Deneuve leaves her very bourgeois married life each afternoon to work as the ravishing and voluntarily ravished "Belle" in a high-class brothel. The line between belly-dancer and prostitute is a very thin one in this film, though Lillia will not cross that line. However, she will come to explore the power of her sexuality in other interesting ways. By the film's final scene, we are in a very odd, complicated place indeed, in which power is displayed in unexpected ways.

* * *

Born in 1971, Raja Amari studied Literature at the University of Tunis, then went on to work as a film critic. She moved to Paris and studied filmmaking at FEMIS, from which she graduated in 1998. While at FEMIS, she made the short film Avril (April), which won awards at festivals in Milan, Tunis, and Greece. In 2000 she made Un Soir de Juillet (One Evening in July), which has become part of the Mama Africa series. Satin Rouge has garnered international success and extensive releases around the world. As the film demonstrates, she is an extremely promising young director, technically skilled and wise beyond her years.

--Notes by Michael Dembrow

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