‘Who Do I Belong To’ Review: Tunisian-American Director Meryam Joobeur Makes a Handsomely Crafted Debut
variety.comCatherine Bray Aïcha (Salha Nasraoui) and her husband Brahim (Mohamed Hassine Grayaa) live on a farm in northern Tunisia. It’s a modern rural environment of goats, trucks, home cooking and tight-knit families.
In Meryam Joobeur‘s feature-length debut “Who Do I Belong To,” an early sequence of Aïcha shaving Brahim’s face — an act of intimacy and trust — introduces a key part of the director’s aesthetic strategy: DP Vincent Gonneville’s frequent use of extreme close-ups on the actors’ faces.
At times, the camera hovers so close that they almost stop looking like faces at all; there’s a landscape quality to facial features observed from this kind of intense proximity.
In the shaving scene, Grayaa’s cheeks, lathered with shaving foam, call to mind mountains buried under drifts of snow. You might expect from this introduction that Brahim, this monumental patriarch, will play a bigger part in the subsequently unfolding events, and it’s true that when angered, he makes his presence felt.
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