We are used to seeing the superficial side of fashion: grand fashion shows, celebrities sitting in the front row or influencers taking selfies boasting about a collaboration, purchase or gift from a luxury house. Yet fashion can be used for different purposes and, in Mounia Meddour's film "Papicha" it becomes a way for the main character to fight misogyny and religious extremism.
Meaning in Algerian slang, "cool", "hip", "pretty" or "rebel" girl, "Papicha" follows the life of Nedjma (Lyna Khoudri), a student of French language and culture at Algiers University with a passion for fashion, and of her friends in the 1990s, when the country's civil war between government and Islamist militants was just starting.
When we first meet her at the beginning of the film, Nedjma, nicknamed Papicha, is sneaking out of her university dorm with her friend Wassila (Shirine Boutella), to go out dancing. They get an illegal taxi, get rebuked by the driver as they change in the back while Technotronic's 1989 hit "Get Up (Before The Night Is Over)" plays in the background, and then get stopped by men with guns at a check point.
There is a first mini-runway show in the club toilets: Nedjma, who wants to wear what she wants and refuses to cover her hair, runs indeed her own independent business, selling dresses she makes on order in the ladies' room. The night seems to be a success, but, on their way back, they start seeing posters ordering women to cover up - "Sister, take care of your image or we will", they warn. Besides, the authorities spike the milk in the girls' university canteen with bromide that is supposed to suppress their "desires" and lecturers who speak French are attacked by extremists who disrupt their classes.
After tragedy strikes her family, Nedjma has a controversial idea: fashioning a collection from the traditional women's wrap or haik and organising a fashion show in the university halls of residence. Obviously, she will clash with Islamists and even buying her materials from the usual fabric shop, now under a new owner and selling "antibacterial" hijabs rather than beads, sequins and colourful fabric, will become more difficult. Nedjma will show an extraordinary resilience to the blows life deals to her, going through with her runway, until tragedy will strike again.
Algerian Meddour plays with contrasts in this semi-autobiographical story (as a student she lived in an all-female university dormitory similar to the one we see here, but the terrorist attack on the university campus is a fictional plot): the world she portrays is always suspended between traditions and modernity, from the clothes the girls wear to the music they listen to.
The camera contributes to give via close-ups showing Nedjma's hands pleating and folding fabrics a sort of tactile quality to the film and the director employs fashion to define her characters.
At the very beginning of the film we see the girls changing from casual clothes to their clubbing attires; Nedjma is often showed sketching in her notebooks, even while outside bombs are killing people, creating something beautiful and unique is indeed for the young woman a way to fight against the horror surrounding her; there's the loud mini runway in the ladies' toilets that deeply clashes with the silent preparation of the body of Nedjma's sister, Linda (Meryem Medjkane), murdered by an Islamist woman. There is a moment of feverish madness when Nedjma tries to wash off Linda's blood from the ivory haik her sister was given as a present, and then there's hope when she decides to dye it pink with beetroots dug from an orchard with her hands.
There is a another moment of fashion when Nedjma's mum shows her and Linda how unmarried and married women wear a haik, or how women who want to pass unnoticed wear it with only one eye visible or hold the fabric with their mouths so they can't speak. But the haik, as Nedjma and Linda's mother explains, was also used to smuggle guns and pass unnoticed in front of French troops. This domestic lesson about the haik becomes the main inspiration for Nedjma's final runway.
The fashion show is a way to protest for Nedjma and free herself and her friends from the constraints imposed by the men in their lives who would like them to be covered up and confined to their homes (even the boys Nedjma and Wassila meet in the club and who seem to be very modern, prove to have conservative views about women).
This event is also a tribute to her dead sister and an act of defiance and resistance, an empowering place where all Nedjma's friends celebrate not just her talent, but themselves - from romantic Wassila and Kahina (Zahra Manel Doumandji), who dreams of going to Canada on day, to hijab-wearing Samira (Amira Hilda Douaouda), who walk down the runway smiling and dancing as "Here Comes the Hotstepper" by Ini Kamoze plays in the background.
Last but not least, the show is also a love letter to Algeria, as Nedjma loves her country and doesn't want to leave it (Meddour's family had to leave Algeria and, after death threats against her parents, they moved to France), and a way to look at the future in hope without dening the past.
There is a great architectural element in this film, something that could lead to a comparison with a film very different from this one, but that shares with "Papicha" some elements, dystopic fantasy movie "Paradise Hills" by Alice Waddington. Both the films deal with gender roles and in both the stories there is a sort of interaction between women and the spaces and buildings surrounding them.
In "Papicha" the exterior world is masculine and the interior spaces like the university dormitory where the show also takes place or Nedjma's mum's house are feminine. The city is therefore masculine and Nedjma crossing it in a taxi while she sketches in her notebook or walking through its busy streets with her head uncovered, is a way to mark her presence in a hostile environment.
It is not easy to define this film that was denied a release in Algeria last year (but it was the country's entry for best foreign film at the 92nd Academy Awards) it was selected for the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2019, won two French Césars and in August this year won the people's award at the Umbria Film Festival. Papicha is indeed a political film with some romantic tones and some tragic moments that revolves around a very contemporary theme, the condition of modern women and women's empowerment.
Maybe the composite nature of the movie was caused by the fact that it took five years to make it, so Meddour had the time to rethink some aspects and include more scenes in it, but the best thing about "Papicha" remains its raw energy, anger and fresh vitality (at times reminiscent of Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" - remember the sneaker, punk denim jacket and Michael Jackson badge scene?) and the stubborness of the young women portrayed in it.
"Papicha" is currently available to stream on Curzon Home Cinema.
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