Film Festival 09 - Masquerades
Masquerades
Mascarades, Algeria/France 2008, 92m
Director: Lyes Salem
Festivals: Tribeca, Sydney 2009
This Algerian wedding farce delivers sharp character comedy and
trenchant social satire. Writer/director Lyes Salem plays the
status-hungry Mounir who is nettled by village tittering about his
attractive younger sister Rym's narcolepsy. He shows them who's top
dog with a fantastic pack of lies about her engagement to a
European business mogul. Soon they are all kow-towing and offering
Mounir bribes. Rym's clandestine liaison with his best friend
renders the inevitable truth even more inconvenient than Mounir
realises. - BG. "There is something Borat-like in the joyous
enthusiasm with which he flaunts his braggadocio. If the men's
values are skewed by powerlessness, the women come off as flat-out
magnificent. It may not be pc to make fun of narcolepsy, but when
servicing the slapstick requirements of thoughtful - even socially
conscious - comedy, the joke has much less to do with real illness
than with classically executed farce." - Ronnie Schieb,
Variety
In Arabic and French, with English subtitles
