‘Queens’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Yasmine Benkiran. France/Morocco/Belgium/The Netherlands/Saudi Arabia. 83mins

A Moroccan Thelma And Louise, Queens (Malikates) follows two women on the run from a patriarchal society that seeks to control and subdue them. Yasmine Benkiran’s modest debut feature shows a good deal of promise before an awkward shift towards melodrama in the final stages. Nevertheless, a story of sweet liberation combined with the atmospheric desert locations makes for a largely upbeat, appealing title that could attract further festival interest following a world premiere as the closing night of Venice Critics Week.

Benkiran is bold enough to confront us with characters who are not always sympathetic.

There is a pacy, narrative momentum to Queens as Benkiran, who earned some attention for her 2018 short Winter Time (L’heure driver), swiftly establishes the lives of her two central characters. Zineb (Nisrin Erradi) is a convicted drug dealer nearing the end of her prison sentence. Erradi plays her with a blowsy, swaggering, bad girl arrogance, a firm believer in her oft-stated mantra that  everything will be fine.” When the authorities threaten to place her misbehaving 11 year-old daughter Ines (Rayhan Guaran) in a child protection centre, Zineb breaks out of jail, collects the girl, hijacks a truck and takes to the road.

Asma (Nisrine Benchara) happens to be a passenger in the truck, and is forced to act as a driver for Zineb and Ines. A young mechanic, Asma is under the thumb of her husband Karim (Younes Chara) who takes her wages and tries to unsettle her with tales of women being assaulted and nobody coming to their aid. Her abduction is a liberation from her daily routine.

Queens is a handsome-looking production. Cinematographer Pierre Aim finds warm tones in the interiors; rooms glow from the light reflected off beautifully tiled walls of azure and bright, intricate patterns. In several scenes, characters are in basements or under trucks watching the legs and feet of passersby, trying to divine character traits in the way the they walk or the shoes they wear. When the film hits the road, Aim captures the yellowish hues of desert light and sand cloud in the Atlas desert. Colour is a vital element – especially as Ines has an unwavering belief that they are all on a journey foretold in her storybooks and supposed to be marked by the rays of a marigold sun and the blue rocks at a specific location.

Ines’ fantasy of a powerful witch and human djinns that can be detected by their goat hooves adds a magic realist element to a tale that otherwise frequently doffs its cap to Thelma and Louise. The two central women are marked by their contrasts – one confident, defiant and reckless, the other law-abiding and seemingly mild-mannered. They meet a young hitchhiker along the way, and there is an appealing secondary element in the story of the two cops who are pursuing them. Close to retirement, Nabil (Hamid Nider) is an old dinosaur who resents being partnered by 35 year-old newcomer Batoul (Jalila Talemsi) but the growing mutual respect between them is one of the film’s most heartening elements.

Benkiran is bold enough to confront us with characters who are not always sympathetic. Zaneb is a drug dealer, petty thief and often her own worst enemy. Ines is more than a little brattish. What matters is the way that the odds are stacked against them. There are constant reminders that they live in a man’s world—from the endless patronising comments to the sense of menace in men-only establishments and the macho posturing that surrounds them.

The first hour has a light touch and a sense of adventure before darkening as the reality of the flight from justice begins to strike home. There are faint echoes of a western as the trio struggle on foot towards an ending that allows the magic realist elements of the film to fully blossom.