After Kim Chapiron and Ladj Ly, it's the turn of another member of the Kourtrajmé collective to step behind the camera: Saïd Belktibia. Roqya is his first feature film, on the borderline between thriller and action film, starring Golshifteh Farahani. She plays Nour, a young woman who makes her living smuggling exotic animals, which she then sells to healers.
The film takes pleasure in mocking the emergence of marabouts 2.0, ready to advertise their powers on social networks, when this advertising was previously confined to the distribution of leaflets that were more smile-inducing than anything else outside the Barbès metro station, stubbornly claiming to be able to bring your wife back and make you win the Lotto.
Nour herself admits it, as she develops Baraka, a Doctolib-like app for finding a marabout, shaman or healer rather than a dentist or GP: "It's all business." Until a scene in a clinic in the suburbs where exorcisms are performed day and night; a veritable uberization of maraboutage.
When a consultation goes wrong, she is accused of witchcraft and falls prey to the gullible. And so begins a witch-hunt led by the locals and supported by the muscular mise-en-scène typical of Kourtrajmé productions, with slow-motion shots, rhythmic chases, flaming apartments and violence designed to shock. But despite this seemingly galloping pace, the film quickly reaches a turning point, while the cruel lack of real feeling emanating from the characters makes it impossible to feel any sympathy for them.
Neither this mother in search of her son, nor this violent ex(Jérémy Ferrari, his first film role) who should be raising our hackles, nor this aging father (Denis Lavant) devoted body and soul to his son's mental health, manage to provoke anything in us. Roqya is a distant film from which no real emotion transpires, despite the cries (many) and tears (too) - not even towards the smuggled animals that are sacrificed.
The film's direction is extremely haphazard, and there are no clear-cut opinions on subjects that are important and more topical than ever: prevailing and ordinary misogyny (for a film about a witch, a major figure in feminist history, that's the last straw), as well as the rapid and unstoppable rise of social networks in response to every news item. For a film on such an esoteric subject, we much prefer Salem by Jean-Baptiste Marlin, in theaters almost at the same time.
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