By Pierre Jasmin, artist for peace
Our ideals shattered by decadent capitalism triumphant in the televisual ugliness of rapist heroes make us relive an abrupt fall in ideals so strong that it brings me back to a theatrical world in which I had collaborated in Vienna, a month before my year in Moscow in 1978: I then contributed to the play Grandeur et decadence de Mahagonny by Kurt Weil and Bertold Brecht, which foreshadowed its premiere in 1930 the obscene arrival of Nazism.
Thanks to the demanding and poetic art of the fabulous Tunisian director established in Montreal, There we come from tells the story of a return of a fallen ideal, which we guess is the Islamic Jihad undertaken by two brothers, whose despair so black cannot be further burdened by any judgment whatsoever: emerges, in a series of slippages, the glimpsed redemption of their souls, although weighed down by murders, this time in the manner of Robert Bresson.
The magnificently framed images with countless close-ups, in landscapes of Tunisian meadows and seasides haunted by actors devoured by their characters, immerse us in the eternal subject of warlike devastation, rarely so masterfully exploited, including by haunting music, but not with battlefield violence. Madame Joobeur turns her sharp gaze to men who are internally torn.
The vast majority of our politicians judge immigrants with arrogance, arrogance and insensitivity, viewing them at best as contributors to the small commercial economy. As for their past, we prefer to ignore their paths strewn with pitfalls, which the film Io, Capitano had chosen to illustrate in an epic way with two flamboyant actors. Quite the opposite in this humble film where the actors, although extinct, inexplicably succeed in bringing to life this new magical example of female cinematographic art: we think of Mariloup Wolfe in Jouliks, of Barbeau-Lavalette in White Dog, of Maryse Legagneur in Le last meal or the Danielle Trottier-Fabienne Larouche tandem in Cœur Battant for their implosive explorations of intimacy, here behind closed doors implacable of refugees in their own country, prostrate in the disillusionment of returning from an exile which we guess was undertaken by the illusion of a religious crusade like Daesh.
But the director never passes judgment, she is content to bear witness to the painful ravages of an environment of extreme rural poverty with shepherds very different from the sympathetic volunteer in Deraspe’s film. Those of Joobeur are forced to face the hard, very hard task of basic survival. We contemplate, stunned prey, the unbearable intra-family tensions that a woman whom I called Mother Courage in a Brechtian enthusiasm, tries to calm, by firmly seeking to reconcile a husband with rigid traditional principles with his three sons still alive, the even younger in the skirts of her loving mother.
But one of them brought back from Syria a non-Muslim woman, although dressed in a burka, to escape the inquisitive gazes who mostly wanted to judge her, an all-too-tiny minority seeking to understand and love the impious foreigner. We then move, inexorably, towards an outcome that we sense is sacrificial. Thus, Meryam Joobeur’s work serves as an embarrassing and inverted mirror for our society hypnotized by false American glamour.
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