For all its big themes, there is a vagueness to Hafsia Herzi’s anecdotal character study about a 17-year-old named Fatima (Nadia Melliti in her first screen role). Adapted from Fatima Daas’s autofiction novel ‘The Last One’, published in 2020, there is much to admire in the tenderness that saturates depictions of the nude female form and in the euphoria pulsing through a handful of lesbian club scenes.
It’s hard to shake the feeling elsewhere that specific characterisation has been sacrificed in order to dutifully service the identity markers of Fatima’s life. She is defined through the prism of being a queer Muslim navigating the transition between home with her Algerian parents and adulthood according to her own values in Paris. There is a little sense of how Fatima exists as a person unplugged from these headline tussles. We are told that she is a keen footballer, but it’s only in the final scene that we witness these skills. This is a character study about a character that remains out of view.
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Divided into seasonal subheadings – Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter – Herzi introduces Fatima in boisterous scenes with sisters at home. At school male friends talk loudly and graphically about (imaginary?) sexual encounters. When a quiet scene finally comes its consequences are louder still. She sneaks a meeting with her sometimes boyfriend who negs her for not dressing more femininely before suggesting marriage. The spectre of traditional patriarchal gender roles looms. Perhaps this is why Fatima is primed to fly at a gay classmate who correctly notices that she is of his tribe.
All the thanks he receives is a broken pair of glasses, nonetheless, his observation pushes Fatima into exploring the women-only section of dating apps. She gives a fake name and a fake nationality as she hoovers up experiences until a real life encounter with Ji-Na (Park Ji-Min, iridescent) opens her up to first love.
Mellit works overtime to emote something between the lines of a character required to be impassive and contained in most situations. Scenes of intimacy, dancing and a dream where she grinds to a halt at a swimming pool reveal a potential otherwise sublimated by a script overly preoccupied with moving us from A to B. There is a, perhaps appreciable, lack of trust in the audience to understand the cultural forces at play. Hence there are scenes unpacking everything from homophobia within traditional Islam to a list of what lesbians do for sexual gratification
The cost of the film’s need to spell out the conflicting elements of Fatima’s life is that she is not afforded the same gorgeous vitality that animates Ji-Na and a lesbian couple she meets in another season. This is a frustrating film that ticks all the boxes that make up a person without pumping in the oxygen that would make them come alive.
Herzi convinces that the out lesbian life is a rich one and that Algerian/French/Muslim culture is full of texture and nuance. The backdrops in La Petite Dernière are carefully wrought, it’s only the teenager herself who is crushed by the burden of all that she represents.
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