La Petite Dernière – first-look review

For all its big themes, there is a vague­ness to Haf­sia Herzi’s anec­do­tal char­ac­ter study about a 17-year-old named Fati­ma (Nadia Mel­li­ti in her first screen role). Adapt­ed from Fati­ma Daas’s aut­ofic­tion nov­el ​‘The Last One’, pub­lished in 2020, there is much to admire in the ten­der­ness that sat­u­rates depic­tions of the nude female form and in the eupho­ria puls­ing through a hand­ful of les­bian club scenes.

It’s hard to shake the feel­ing else­where that spe­cif­ic char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion has been sac­ri­ficed in order to duti­ful­ly ser­vice the iden­ti­ty mark­ers of Fatima’s life. She is defined through the prism of being a queer Mus­lim nav­i­gat­ing the tran­si­tion between home with her Alger­ian par­ents and adult­hood accord­ing to her own val­ues in Paris. There is a lit­tle sense of how Fati­ma exists as a per­son unplugged from these head­line tus­sles. We are told that she is a keen foot­baller, but it’s only in the final scene that we wit­ness these skills. This is a char­ac­ter study about a char­ac­ter that remains out of view.

Divid­ed into sea­son­al sub­head­ings – Spring, Sum­mer, Autumn and Win­ter – Herzi intro­duces Fati­ma in bois­ter­ous scenes with sis­ters at home. At school male friends talk loud­ly and graph­i­cal­ly about (imag­i­nary?) sex­u­al encoun­ters. When a qui­et scene final­ly comes its con­se­quences are loud­er still. She sneaks a meet­ing with her some­times boyfriend who negs her for not dress­ing more fem­i­nine­ly before sug­gest­ing mar­riage. The spec­tre of tra­di­tion­al patri­ar­chal gen­der roles looms. Per­haps this is why Fati­ma is primed to fly at a gay class­mate who cor­rect­ly notices that she is of his tribe.

All the thanks he receives is a bro­ken pair of glass­es, nonethe­less, his obser­va­tion push­es Fati­ma into explor­ing the women-only sec­tion of dat­ing apps. She gives a fake name and a fake nation­al­i­ty as she hoovers up expe­ri­ences until a real life encounter with Ji-Na (Park Ji-Min, iri­des­cent) opens her up to first love.

Mel­lit works over­time to emote some­thing between the lines of a char­ac­ter required to be impas­sive and con­tained in most sit­u­a­tions. Scenes of inti­ma­cy, danc­ing and a dream where she grinds to a halt at a swim­ming pool reveal a poten­tial oth­er­wise sub­li­mat­ed by a script over­ly pre­oc­cu­pied with mov­ing us from A to B. There is a, per­haps appre­cia­ble, lack of trust in the audi­ence to under­stand the cul­tur­al forces at play. Hence there are scenes unpack­ing every­thing from homo­pho­bia with­in tra­di­tion­al Islam to a list of what les­bians do for sex­u­al gratification

The cost of the film’s need to spell out the con­flict­ing ele­ments of Fatima’s life is that she is not afford­ed the same gor­geous vital­i­ty that ani­mates Ji-Na and a les­bian cou­ple she meets in anoth­er sea­son. This is a frus­trat­ing film that ticks all the box­es that make up a per­son with­out pump­ing in the oxy­gen that would make them come alive.

Herzi con­vinces that the out les­bian life is a rich one and that Algerian/​French/​Muslim cul­ture is full of tex­ture and nuance. The back­drops in La Petite Dernière are care­ful­ly wrought, it’s only the teenag­er her­self who is crushed by the bur­den of all that she represents.

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