`Silences' Tells A Compelling Story Of Palace Life

----------------------------------------------------------------- Movie review

XXX "The Silences of the Palace," with Amel Hedhili, Hend Sabri, Najia Ouerghi, Ghalia Lacrois. Directed and written by Moufida Tlatli. Varsity. No rating; mature subject matter. In Arabic and French, with English subtitles. -----------------------------------------------------------------

Directed by Moufida Tlatli, who worked as an editor on the provocative "Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces," this compelling French-Tunisian production won the Satyajit Ray award at last year's San Francisco International Film Festival.

The association with Ray is apt. Making her directing debut, Tlatli achieves a limpid, Ray-like simplicity that helps her to tell her story on two levels at once. The script, about a servant's illegitimate daughter recalling her life of glorified slavery in a country still struggling with French rule, works as both personal drama and political metaphor.

Much of the film is told in flashback, as the heroine, 25-year-old Alia (Ghalia Lacroix), remembers her childhood in the royal palace with her mother Khedija (Amel Hedhili). Alia does not know who her father is. At one point it's suggested that it is better not to know: "In the palace we were taught one rule: silence." At a more extreme moment, one character expresses her frustration with this code with a silent scream.

As an adult, Alia no longer lives at the palace, though she feels almost equally enslaved to a life that seems to be made up mostly of singing at other people's weddings and aborting her own fetuses. Her longtime boyfriend, Lotfi (Sami Bouajila), refuses to marry her or allow her to keep their babies.

Memories of the younger Alia (played by Hend Sabri) emerge when the adult, pregnant Alia returns to the palace to attend the funeral of Prince Sid'Ali, who may have been her father. The palace is no longer as splendid as it was, the head servant is blind and dying, but the place instantly triggers recollections of her beginnings as a musician and a rebel.

This happened simultaneously through her forbidden friendship with a royal daughter who shared her birthday and encouraged her interest in the lute. Music became a way out, as well as a way of dealing with enslavement, and its value is celebrated in several scenes in which the palace servants all but whistle while they work.

"Music and songs are a very important part of Arab culture in general," said Tlatli during her visit to the Women in Cinema festival here last weekend. "In the Arab culture, they're tools to express yourself. An Arab man doesn't say `I love you,' but in a song he can."

Following a film-school education in Paris, Tlatli has spent most of her life as a script supervisor and an editor of Moroccan, Tunisian and Algerian films.

"I was very happy as a film editor," she said through a translator. "I thought I'd be an editor all my life. I had no ambitions to direct. I started writing this script in 1988, and I didn't have anyone in mind to direct.

"But once I was finished, I knew it had to be the author's film. I thought it would be a parentheses in my career, and I'd go back to editing, but it turned out to be so much more pleasurable than editing."

Tunisia's Ministry of Culture encouraged her to make the film, and "The Silences of the Palace" became the most popular movie in Tunisian history, opening in five theaters at once and playing to 400,000 paying customers. It went on to win awards at Cannes, Chicago and other festivals.

Once she chose the palace setting, the story of Tunisian independence followed, as well as the parallels between women's independence and the country's liberation.

"The film in a way came to me," she said. "As I was writing the script, I realized that I had been living what I'd been writing. I didn't live in a palace, but I wanted to talk about the relationships between women of several generations, and the palace was just a way for me to tell this story.

"The setting makes it a little exaggerated, caricatured even. But if it had been a normal setting it wouldn't have been as powerful."