The Little One: Cannes Award-Winning Film Review

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Or the discovery of his homosexuality by Fatima, a post-adolescent from the Parisian suburbs, at least her acceptance clashed in a context full of contradictions, unthoughts and various hostilities. Homophobia which permeates the daily life of the neighborhood, apparent incompatibility with its practice of Islam, initiation into the customs of bourgeois life… Actress-director Hafsia Herzi takes on this coming-of-age story, taken from the bestselling novel by Fatima Daas, like one walks a minefield. Between meticulousness and worry, asphyxiating modesty and relaxation, “The Little Last One” progresses on a thread, anchored to the explosive duality of its walled-up heroine: her perpetual guilt, her anxiety of being unmasked coexist with a desire that is sometimes circumscribed, sometimes denied, but so irrepressible that it infuses each image, each situation, with a phenomenal intensity.

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The success of the film owes a lot to its revelation Nadia Melliti, a neophyte who returned from Cannes with the acting prize, whose talent lies in her way of not doing too much, or even doing too little – ideal for portraying a Fatima locked down by her postures and her inexperience in life. It also has a lot to do with the assumed mannerism of the staging. Revealed as an actress in “La Graine et le Mulet”, by Abdellatif Kechiche, Hafsia Hersi reiterates here the main lines of “La Vie d’Adèle”, the famous film by her mentor. Fatima therefore follows in the footsteps of another apprentice in love (violent denial, love at first sight, the dizziness of a painful breakup, so many milestones that build the sentimental life of a young adult), as the filmmaker draws on the stylistic grammar of a master to make it her own and chart her own path. This simultaneous emancipation (the homosexual affirmation of Fatima, that of the actress Hafsia Herzi as director) proves overwhelming as the film, if it does not shy away from any obstacle, accepts from start to finish its share of doubt and humility, establishing questioning as a cardinal value.