{"id":379,"date":"2026-06-05T17:35:42","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T17:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=379"},"modified":"2026-06-05T17:35:42","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T17:35:42","slug":"the-little-sister-reviewed-an-intellectual-yet-passionate-coming-out-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=379","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Little Sister,\u201d Reviewed: an Intellectual Yet Passionate Coming-Out Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Modernity is infrastructure, and the writer and director Hafsia Herzi\u2019s film \u201cThe Little Sister\u201d is, in this regard, distinctly modern, even as its style and form follow a long-established tradition of humanist realism. Adapted from \u201cThe Last One,\u201d a largely autobiographical novel by Fatima Daas, it\u2019s centered on a high-school senior, also named Fatima Daas (played by Nadia Melliti, a first-time actor), who lives with her parents and her two older sisters in an apartment complex in an ethnically diverse suburb of Paris. Fatima is a good student and an enthusiastic, if solitary, athlete, a runner and a soccer enthusiast who kicks a ball around, all by herself, in the building\u2019s front yard. Her fashion sense is athletic, too\u2014track suit, no makeup, hair pulled back. She has a sort of platonic boyfriend (Ahmed Kheloufi), a serious young man who wants to marry her as soon as she graduates\u2014even as he complains that she should dress \u201cmore feminine.\u201d But Fatima is attracted to women, and, soon after he proposes, she acts on her attraction for the first time, by signing up for a lesbian dating app.<\/p>\n

Read more I Need a Critic: June, 2026, Edition<\/a><\/p>\n

At school, Fatima passes through a veritable gantlet of sexualized discourse. Her best friends are boys, and, hanging out with them outside the building before the bell rings, she listens to their macho posturing about hookups and the homophobic banter that goes with it. In class, the teacher seeks a volunteer to give a presentation on Oscar Wilde and \u201cThe Portrait of Dorian Gray,\u201d which gives rise to more anti-gay snark. Right after class, a boy calls Fatima a lesbian, and a fight results, prompting her to suffer an asthma attack.<\/p>\n

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The following scene, of Fatima visiting a pulmonologist, is, in a peculiar way, the highlight of the movie. Nothing dramatic takes place, but Herzi nonetheless invests the appointment with great emotional weight via the scene\u2019s unusual length, elaborate dialogue, and spare but keen visual concentration. Watching the pulmonologist character, Dr. Pr\u00e9vost, I was sure that he was no actor but a real-life doctor speaking to the actress as he would to a patient. (I guessed correctly\u2014he\u2019s played by Pascal Chanez, a professor of pulmonology in Marseille.) Dr. Pr\u00e9vost opens with an ordinary but probing question: did anything stressful happen that may have caused the asthma attack? Fatima says no, even as her thoughts are obviously brought back to the fight and what caused it. While discussing lung inflammation and the importance of an inhaler (and administering a breathing test live onscreen), the doctor asks Fatima whether she smokes, and invites her to a session of so-called Asthma School, where, under his guidance, young patients can discuss the practicalities of living with the disease. What Herzi dramatizes is a vision of medical care as psychotherapy by proxy, inextricably intertwined with the most intimate details of a patient\u2019s private life. This doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that secrets are divulged in the examination room, but that the patient herself is brought to self-awareness. Soon after the doctor\u2019s appointment, Fatima turns down the marriage proposal and goes on her first date with a woman.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The movie spans about a year, in the course of which Fatima passes her baccalaureate exam (with honors) and begins commuting to university in Paris. In a philosophy class, the professor offers a lecture on the concept of emancipation, as exemplified in the work of the sixteenth-century writer La Bo\u00e9tie. Fatima, who\u2019s of Algerian descent, is a practicing Muslim; she\u2019s seen praying several times throughout the film, and when her faith is shaken by romantic turmoil, she consults an imam. Both of these characters are played by real-life professionals, the professor Ahmet Insel and the imam Abdelali Mamoun; for that matter, Fatima\u2019s high-school literature teacher, in whose class she read Wilde, is played by the real-life high-school teacher Julie Chaintron. In deploying these real-life counterparts to the movie\u2019s fictional professionals, Herzi yields the screen to their experience, expertise, and character, offering not just persuasive dramatic depictions but a kind of intellectual realism\u2014the mental infrastructure of everyday life.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another realm of knowledge which quickly takes its place in the drama, too, this one involving Fatima\u2019s first date, with an older woman named Ingrid (Sophie Garagnon). At Fatima\u2019s request, they park at a remote location, which Ingrid at first takes as a prompt for a quick hookup. But it turns out that Fatima, who has connected with Ingrid under a pseudonym, wants somewhere they can talk. Fatima asks Ingrid about her own self-recognition as a lesbian, and then asks for detailed lessons\u2014spoken, not performed\u2014on lesbian sex. The date is a form of education; in a sense, Ingrid\u2019s role is continuous with that of the other trusted authority figures through whom Fatima is informed and enlightened.<\/p>\n

Read more Maggie O\u2019Farrell and the Art of Inventing the Past<\/a><\/p>\n

What emerges is a notion\u2014perhaps more commonplace in the explicitly multicultural U.S. than in France\u2014of homosexuality as not just a practice but a way of life, an identity, formed in part out of the social opposition that queer people still face by way of religion, family, and the weight of tradition. That sense of identity arises all the more clearly in scenes of Fatima\u2019s encounters with other lesbians: in the shock of recognition that passes between her and a nurse (Park Ji-min) at Asthma School, or in a charged meeting with a classmate\u2019s older cousin (Mouna Soualem), who is instantly certain that Fatima is gay and scoffs at her denials.<\/p>\n

As a genre, \u201cThe Little Sister\u201d is a psychological thriller, even a film noir: a tale of a double life, which Herzi constructs with a watchmaker\u2019s precision and an analytical clarity that distinguishes Melliti\u2019s starring performance all the more. There\u2019s a world of warmth surrounding Fatima\u2014a tight-knit but not smothering family, caring teachers, sincere friends. The imam and the doctor are wise and compassionate. But Fatima isn\u2019t ready to submit herself to judgment or opposition; she\u2019s startlingly two-faced, her life radically divided. At home, in the neighborhood, at school, and with classmates, she\u2019s tautly guarded. In queer circles (bars, parties, a Pride march), she cuts loose in her body language and facial expressions, bursting out with something like joy.<\/p>\n

Herzi presents Fatima\u2019s experience in solid blocks of self-contained and emblematic scenes that, in a film of ideas, signify ideas\u2014sometimes all too well, at risk of feeling generic, merely illustrative. But the core of the movie is Fatima\u2019s presence in closeup shots, which find her nearly stony, hauntedly pensive, both deeply vulnerable and bearing a defensive mask of opacity. Her fine range of seemingly similar expressions is alive with a torrential variety of emotional currents that she both conceals and protects.<\/p>\n

Melliti is utterly untrained as an actress. Like Fatima, she is of Algerian descent, grew up in an apartment complex in a suburb of Paris, and was a teen-age athlete, a soccer player. After high school, she entered university to become a physical-education teacher, and was far along in her studies when a casting director working with Herzi spotted her in Paris, spoke with her about the movie, and asked to take her picture. Herzi was instantly taken with the photo of Melliti and, after auditions, offered her the role. Remarkably, Melliti\u2019s personality converged with the role in surprising ways. According to Le Monde<\/em>, she said \u201cnothing to anyone, neither to her mother, nor to her brothers and sisters, nor to her friends,\u201d about being cast in the movie and acting in it, until the day she left for Cannes, for the film\u2019s 2025 premi\u00e8re. As Melliti explained, \u201cThat\u2019s how I am in life: I don\u2019t like revealing my processes.\u201d In that sense, she was already embodying aspects of her character before the camera ever rolled. The result is a cinematic M\u00f6bius strip joining performance and reality, the expressivity of concealment and the essential inward unity behind a double life. Through Melliti\u2019s performance and Herzi\u2019s alertness to her personality, \u201cLittle Sister\u201d fills the screen with the passionate physicality behind inner life. \u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Cowboy Heaven, in MOMA\u2019s Westerns Series<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Brody reviews \u201cThe Little Sister,\u201d directed by Hafsia Herzi and starring Nadia Melliti in her d\u00e9but role.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":378,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-front-row"],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cThe Little Sister,\u201d Reviewed: an Intellectual Yet Passionate Coming-Out Drama - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=379\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u201cThe Little Sister,\u201d Reviewed: an Intellectual Yet Passionate Coming-Out Drama - 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