‘Honey Cigar’ Review: Personal and Political Issues Merge in Female-Centered French Debut
Jay Weissberg A 17-year-old Parisian girl of Algerian parentage struggles to negotiate the conflicting tensions between desire, familial expectation, peer pressure and heritage in debuting writer-director Kamir Aïnouz’s intermittently successful “Honey Cigar.” Refreshingly empowering in how it foregrounds the female gaze together with the young woman’s ownership of her sexual urges, the film too often falls back on paper-thin characterizations that trip up the director’s ambitious attempt to give equal voice to a mélange of weighty personal and political issues.