The Source

In a tiny, remote village somewhere in North Africa, the men are idle and the women work. All day, it seems, the men sit in a café under a sweet sun and tell jokes. Since now there is no harvest and no work for their men, the women keep the place going; they are dutiful, loving and tough. It is a tradition in this place for the women to fetch the water from the well. This task makes for hard labor. The long daily trek, up and down steep hills, is made over rough, rocky, unforgiving ground. This work comes at a cost; many of the village women have miscarried. Not even a pregnancy is enough to get between tradition and duty.

Young, childless Leila (Leila Bekhti) has had enough. She implores the village women to go on a ‘sex strike’. The women will withhold ‘loving’ (as they call it). They will also demand that the men find a way to persuade the government to provide infrastructure finance so that the well can be pumped into the village centre.

The women adopt Leila’s tactic. Happy marriages become tortured, sometimes violent. The village men are hurt and offended. The women, some consumed with guilt and longing, begin to question their ‘strike’. Meanwhile, the very social foundations of this village, governed by religion and tradition, begin to look shaky as the strike forces the men and women into a conflict over every aspect of their lives.

Director Radu Mihaileanu’s gripping new drama The Source is a good natured, soulful and quite often funny story about love and responsibility. What starts off as a tale built on a quest for natural justice and a seemingly simplistic story of gender wars evolves over its two hour-plus running time into a compassionate piece about individual sexual identity.

Using traditional-style songs, a plethora of subplots and much romantic intrigue in the very best melodramatic tradition, Mihaileanu and co-screenwriter Alain-Michel Blanc explore the impact of the sex-strike on the characters in a way that’s human, even sweet.

The plotting is smart, high impact and handled with great economy and the subtle power relationships and social conventions of the village are brilliantly integrated into the main action. For instance, Leila’s strategy is motivated by her background and status. Literate, and clever and full of aspirations, she is a rank outsider here; not only is she from a different tribe that makes its home a long way from the village, but unlike so many of the other women, her marriage was not arranged but came from desire. Indeed, the film is in some ways a romance between Leila and her husband Sami (Saleh Bakri), a schoolteacher and the village’s only intellectual (a fact that further alienates Leila from some of the other women). Their marriage is based on mutual trust, but the crisis brings out secrets that have long been hidden.

Still, Leila finds an ally amongst one of their village’s own and it’s an elder stateswoman. In one of the film’s best scenes, Mother Rifle (Algerian actor Biyouna), a kind of village ‘wise woman’ who plays nurse, counsel, therapist and advisor to all, explains how at 14 her happiness ended because it was then she was married off to a 40-year-old with two kids of his own. There is tradition, Mother Rifle argues, but it should be one founded on mutual respect and a love that is heartfelt. (That sounds preachy, but it plays like a plea from the heart.)

The film, though, isn’t all angst and anger directed at ‘lazy’ men; the humour is great. There’s one bit where the women do a song-and-dance routine to entertain some passing tourist trade. The lyrics are savagely satirical sending up the village blokes and their ‘uselessness’; the men are furious but are powerless to act, since they would lose face with the strangers. Of course, the tourists, in a wonderful irony, are unable to understand the language and think the whole scene is all very quaint.

Debuting in Cannes last year, Mihaileanu’s film was scorned by some critics. They found its mix of styles – the doco ‘you are there’ detail of cinematographer Glynn Speeckaert, the attention to cultural practice and custom combined with its feverish emotional scenes, classical structure and comedy – just too messy and inconsistent. But an opening title frames the action that follows as mythic and, for me, the film works that way; there’s a really beautiful, ethereal quality about it right from the start. It’s got a density and intensity of an epic story, but the feelings are intimate and every emotion seems earned and felt. That’s mostly because the actors, all of them excellent, are living their roles, not playing them. All incidental pleasures aside, what’s best about the film is that in the end it gives off a warm optimistic glow about the possibility of romantic love in amongst the life and death realities of cultural tradition. In an age when the current cinema is so full of cheap sentiment and cheap cynicism, and a helpless irony, such a conviction carries a genuine moral force that’s truly moving.