Honey and Ashes

With Hollywood's version of feminism these days confined to dedicated mothers dying of cancer, it's both refreshing and embarrassing to come across this searing indictment of misogyny and blunt affirmation of women's solidarity from the patriarchal enclave of Tunisia. Nadia Fares's Honey and Ashes weaves with deceptive skill and fluidity the tales of three women of disparate social status and their varied responses to an oppressive Islamic culture. The teenage Leila is seen at the beginning, ducking into an alley to remove her modest kerchief and overcoat to leap on the back of her lover Hassen's motorbike for a seaside tryst. Local yokels intrude, and Leila escapes near-rape by flagging down a woman doctor's Mercedes, whose fabricated excuse to Leila's father for her lateness doesn't spare the young girl a beating.

Although relatively autonomous and a single mother, the doctor is still constrained to bend or ignore the truth, as when she investigates the death of a young girl her daughter's age and remains silent, though she knows it was from abuse. She will not remain quiet, however, when a university professor brings his sensuous wife in to have a broken hand treated. "The truth will not heal," she proclaims, and this fervor fires Fares's deftly structured, lucidly neo-realistic indictment. Despite its somewhat hurried, melodramatic dénouement, Honey and Ashes is neither sweet nor acrid, bromidic nor preachy. In its 80 minutes it tells more about the plight of men and women than a year's worth of studio confections.

-- Peter Keough