‘Four Daughters’ Review: Kaouther Ben Hania’s Metafiction Conceals and Reveals the Tragedy of Radicalization
variety.comJessica Kiang Late on in Kaouther Ben Hania’s compelling, ambitious hybrid “Four Daughters,” Olfa Hamrouni — the film’s focus, its fixation and its most charismatically contradictory character — strokes a purring, heavily pregnant ginger cat.
Sometimes, she tells us, a cat will be so scared for her babies that she eats them. It’s Olfa’s covert acknowledgement that her own misguided protective urge, forged by her hard history with men and mother alike, might have contributed to her life’s great, rupturing tragedy: when, in 2015, the elder two of her four girls ran away to join ISIS.
But it also recalls one of her earlier to-camera segments, when she described her daughters, as though shielding herself from the pain of the real with the language of fable, as having been “devoured by the wolf.” So which is it: Were Ghofran and Rahma, 16 and 15 at the time of their disappearance, eaten up by their cat-mother or consumed by the predatory wolves of religious fundamentalism, cultural indoctrination, ISIS itself?
Of course, it’s neither one nor the other entirely, which makes the form of “Four Daughters” — neither fiction, nor documentary; neither memoir, nor reportage — oddly fitting, even when it keeps bumping up against Ben Hania’s oddly romanced filmmaking.
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