Sexuality and the Police State in Férid Boughedir’s Halfaouine

Sexuality and the Police State in Férid Boughedir’s Halfaouine

Robert Lang

Noura is a boy stuck in the stage between childhood and adolescence while simultaneously making the complicated transition from being ‘one of the kids’ to ‘one of the men’. In one scene, two older boys are talking to a girl, and the boys will not let Noura join because, “this isn’t kid stuff.” Shortly thereafter, several younger boys splashing each other by the water fountain and ask Noura to join and his response is, “I’m not a kid anymore.”  Although Noura wishes to assimilate into male society, he finds that the men are less accepting of childish characteristics than are the women.

At the beginning of the movie, he does not know how to express his desire, or even what to make if it in the first place. Towards the beginning of the film, he frequently observes women respectfully and from a distance.  In this way, he is flirting with desire without falling under its full effects.

The women in the film act as a shield and shelter for Noura to the harsher aspects of adult male society. It is his mother who protects him from his father’s violence and cares for him, both in the physical and emotional senses. However, Noura’s budding desire for the opposite sex is driving a wedge between himself and his shelter. These women have raised and nutrtured him, but his budding sexuality faces him with the conflict of assimilating into male culture. It seems as though the women perceive desire, sexuality, and love as a private matter – a taboo, of sorts. The men that Noura interacts with, however, are very open when discussing these matters. Due to this dichotomy, he finds himself incapable of expressing his own desire in the female sphere – it is only among the men that he is able to talk of desire. Although the male society is less tolerant of childhood nuances, it offers a well-established norm for the expression of desire.

I found Professor Lang’s quote about finding the soul and beauty in the Tunisian culture as a means to overlook the oppression to be very applicable. The police prove to be a hostile force of opposition throughout the film, but his enchantment with the new experience of desire keeps these worries from Noura’s mind. Last semester, we saw this them appear in several of the pieces we focused on, most notably in the Object of Desire. We have seen lovers overlook terrorism, oppression, and death to enslave themselves to desire and bask in the rapture that is their beloved.