In writer-director Meryam Joobeur’s feature debut, Who Do I Belong To (Mé el Aïn), a family of Tunisian farmers is torn apart when their two eldest sons join ISIS, leaving their household a wreck and causing even more damage when one of them returns.
If the plot sounds slightly familiar, that’s because it was also the story of the recent Oscar-nominated documentary Four Daughters, in which two Tunisian girls run away from home to become radical Islamists, abandoning their mother and younger sisters.
Who Do I Belong To
Both movies were directed by women and focus on the impacts of Islamic extremism — the trauma it inflicts upon families, as well as the traumas that may have prompted such a turn to extremism in the first place. But in terms of the filmmaking they couldn’t be more diametrically opposed: Four Daughters is a self-reflective work of nonfiction in which real people play themselves alongside trained actors, restaging events to try and analyze them. Who Do I Belong To, on the other hand, is a work of highly stylized fiction, and one that transforms into a magical realist horror flick in the last act.
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It’s worth comparing the two only to grasp why Joobeur’s film, despite its serious subject matter and intense sense of craft, never fully convinces in its depiction of what radical Islam can do to a well-meaning family like Aïcha’s. This is partially because the drama feels so heavy-handed, with the director relying on lots of symbolism, a nonstop brooding score and too many close-ups to convey the anguish and sorrow of her characters. It’s also because the move toward an M. Night Shyamalan-style denouement seems so ill-advised, subtracting from the emotional impact of the material.
The story starts off intriguingly enough, with Joobeur evocatively introducing us to Aïcha (Salha Nasraoui), a mother of three, who, along with her husband Brahim (Mohamed Hassine Grayaa), runs a poor but picturesque farm on the cliffs near the Mediterranean Sea. During a wedding she learns that her two older boys, Mehdi (Malek Mechergui) and Amine (Chaker Mechergui), have run off, and before long hears the dreaded news: They have signed up with ISIS.
The director, working with DP Vincent Gonneville, paints Aïcha and her household in thick brushstroke-like shots filled with saturated colors and consisting mostly of close-ups or medium close-ups — the film was lensed with the box-like 1:133 format — to the point that it can be a claustrophobic affair to sit through. This may be intentional on Joobeur’s part, but the result is a brooding drama that’s given little room to breathe, with the near-constant score by Peter Venne relentlessly hammering home its solemnity.
Not that there’s anything to rejoice over for Aïcha, Brahim and their youngest son, Adam (Rayen Mechergui), who are stuck in an unbearable situation: Either Mehdi and Amine will be killed in Syria or Iraq, or they will come home and get arrested by the Tunisian authorities, who have zero tolerance for radical Islamists.
Mehdi does finally make it back, arriving one day on the farm with a niqab-clad wife, Reem (Dea Liane), who hardly utters a word throughout the entire movie. Nor does Mehdi for that matter: The young man seems to be severely traumatized by his experience as an ISIS combatant, including the loss of his brother.
Joobeur withholds key pieces of information from both the viewer and Mehdi’s family, until dishing them out in flashbacks that take over during the film’s second half. Those scenes, set in a hellish war zone ruled by sadistic thugs, are gruesome in their depiction of what joining ISIS means for naïve boys like Mehdi and Amine. If the goal of Who Do I Belong To is to reveal the horrors of such a despised terrorist organization, then its message is heard loud and clear. But isn’t it sort of stating the obvious?
The director is even more interested in how ISIS’ horrors impact folks back home, damaging innocent Muslims like Aïcha and Brahim who are simply trying to make a living and raise their children. It’s unfortunate, then, that the film’s third act switches to a local murder mystery possibly involving Mehdi and Reem, until switching gears again in the closing sequences to a form of supernatural spookiness. Those plot mechanics wind up muddying the waters too much, even if they’re meant to underscore how wartime traumas can be extremely hard to shake off — to the point that everyone becomes some kind of victim.
