Sainte Rita

by Hicham Lasri

Unknown Binding

About the author

Hicham Lasri, born April 13, 1977 is a casablancais artist: a film director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, comic books’ creator, and lately also a singer in his own band Chic Chocs. Since the age of 16, Hicham Lasri was a compulsive storyteller.

Hicham Lasri started off writing screenplays and plays for the Theatre which he got back to doing this very year. In chronological order Hicham Lasri wrote for the theatre: (K)Rêve (2007), Larmes de joie un jour de Zemzem (2008), & Les invisibles (2019) which he also directed.

In his six feature films he tackles the most taboo topics he can find, so frontally that talking about his movies becomes taboo. His trademark being dissidence, people think twice before approaching his work. In six years, his six movies The End (2012), They Are The Dogs (2013), The Sea is Behind (2015), Starve Your Dog (2016), Headbang Lullaby (2017) & Jahilya (2018) : premiered at CANNES, twice, TIFF, once & BERLINALE, four times. The freshness of Lasri’s vision allowed the teams’ of these respectable cinema festivals to choose his movies on bases other than tokenism and naive cultural diversity quotas. To this day, his movies escape the clichés usually found in North African cinema, and we are happy to say: no Arab was ever a terrorist in a Lasri movie, which is a post 9/11 rarity. His last movie Jahiliya was the final light streak in a sequel of dreams and nightmares embroidered in the national trauma related to the late political regime. The artisan is now on feature film break, taking in enough momentum before kickstarting his seventh film which is currently in the pre-production phase.

During this break, Hicham wrote, directed and produced three short movies, namely, Love in Aleppo (2018) , WASTELAND (2018) & The Male Gaze (2018). We gladly share with you the fruits of some of the most experimental projects of the artist to date. He also wrote 1 novel, 1 graphic novel, started surfing and then made wrote and directed three other short movies: Cruelty Free (2019) Androides & Zombies (2019) & The Last Arab Movie (2019)…okay you get the idea, it’s not a break.

Hicham Lasri is also a novelist of three. Static (2012) , Sainte Rita (2015), Bobblehead (2019) are three novels about many different things but what your average fourth cover will not tell you is that they are intricate ravings that serve as the steel beams to Lasri’s fictional universe. What Hicham Lasri’s novels tell us is this: The protagonist will suffer, the more dominant group will be made of stulti, the love story won’t have a happy ending, the music will exclusively be Rock n’ Roll, and the linearity won’t make it to the final draft. Upcoming are his two novels "L'improbable Fable de Lady Bobblehead" (2020) a science fiction novel about losing one's soul and trying not to lose one's head.

For the national TV, Hicham Lasri makes movies, sitcoms and shows that he describes as works that are made to be viewed inside a family’s home without hurting any domestic sensibilities.

The opus mixtum goes on as we have yet to speak of the web series Hicham Lasri wrote, directed and produced for his online fans’ eyes only. In only two years Hicham Lasri’s original content on youtube generated millions of views, comments and so much hate that we know for sure: the internet loves it! In No Vaseline Fatwa (2016) Hicham Lasri uses Youtube’s codes to tell surreal truths such as those of the freelance terrorist Vlogger documenting his daily life, live from a cave in Afghanistan and in Bissara Overdose (2017) a frustrated single woman’s ramblings become a funny, trashy, Youtube version of No-sex & The City.

The web series Caca Mind is a sarcastic fuck-off to the ambient lack of public spirit found in Moroccan society.

Khal Rass (2017) is a mysterious set of videos showcasing a

Reviews

[Chaimae A · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read Sainte Rita it was for me an unexpected turn taken by an author I already appreciated for other things. It was unexpected because agency was given to two lesbian characters, like it or not, it’s something that doesn’t happen often in Morocco. This resonated with parts of me that aren’t used to find echo outside of me, but it quickly became a kind of red flag too. The stereotype about straight men fetishizing lesbian relationships is more often than not a correct one. So I proceeded carefully trying to unmask the sexist behind the progressive author… Steeltoe and Rita proved to be complex young girls, going about life and love like one does when they’re too young to focus on only what they want, mostly because they don’t seem to have it figured yet. Steeltoe is the cynical type, hiding heaps of pain and fear behind a mask of toughness and a tendency to control her surroundings through sexually objectifying the feminine girls she doesn’t want to compete with on the same field. We know her dreams, her fears, and her defense mechanisms that reflect her lack of experience and of guidance. Rita is portrayed as her exact opposite, a sweet type of girl who hides behind her pretty face and who sexually objectifies herself to get an approximative control of her surroundings. Rita has fears and dreams too, but as the Holly Golightly of this novel, she lives in the moment, and we don’t know too much about her psyche. The main characters are their own headsmen, they both seem to live in a paradigm of “eat or be eaten”. The oppression the characters suffer through comes much more from within them than from outside of them. This extends to the third main character “Mickey” a young man who felt insulted by one of the girls when a bad joke turned out to be not funny to him and who sought revenge, in a disproportionate manner, to say the least, without any spoilers. Mickey is a young man who doesn’t seem to be too different from Steeltoe, they're both plagued with a feeling of inadequacy and are misanthropist characters. They are almost the same person, except for the fact that she “has” Rita and he doesn’t. This seems to make Mickey more of radical misanthropist and at the same time it makes Steeltoe more of a benevolent type of antagonist. Mickey becomes an agent in the story as soon as his heart is broken, his pride couldn’t take it so he seeks to ruin the girls’ relationship, knowing very well that he is gonna regret it, and sabotaging himself in the process. Other characters exist in the story, they are mostly magnified versions of the main characters, and help us understand more about where does Mickey’s rage come from and what disappointed Steeltoe so much in life… At this point the plot seems to be something like this: a sad young man is threatened by a creature of light type of girl who also happens to be queer, and decides to revenge. The red flag that appeared in the beginning is very much cleared up: Sainte Rita does not fetishize lesbians, it’s about people who do and the violence that comes with not accepting one’s own desires.
The writing of the novel is interesting in the sense that we live the characters’ experience not only because we are told about it but also through the way the narration is fragmented. The story is told from the point of view of a somewhat omniscient hyperactive viewer who seemingly gives more focus to Steeltoe than to the other characters. I say hyperactive because things can go very fast at moments, and it’s not gratuitous. The characters' anxiety is a big part of who they are. This is not a group of serene, joyful people and the story is written at the pace of their troubled thinking. This brings me back to the author, this novel and all of the other novels I’ve read of him, as well as the movies he made which seem to be exercices in angle and vantage points. We are not dealing with a monolithic author, and it takes some effort to accept to go along with the author’s rhythm. The way the author tells the story is the way the characters' live it, so yes it is overwhelming.

[EL Beidani salaheddine · Rating 3 out of 5]

C'est un Bon Roman écris comme un scénario, loin du contenu du Roman c un style d'écriture nouveau "Néo-roman" marocain, l'idée du roman rentre dans les sujets Tabous au Maroc. En tout cas le Roman est une fiction, proche ou loin de la réalité ??!