THE STORY – Bouchra is a queer, Moroccan Coyote and filmmaker living in New York, preoccupied with how her sexuality has impacted her relationship with her mother (also a Coyote). The daughter is anxious to move on with her life and career but is plagued by doubts — and convinced that the only way to move on is to use her art to confront the tensions and unresolved issues with her parent.
THE CAST – Meriem Bennani, Yto Barrada, Orian Barki, Ariana Faye Allensworth & Salima Dhaibi
THE TEAM – Orian Barki (Director/Writer) & Meriem Bennani (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 83 Minutes
Filmmaker Bouchra (Meriem Bennani) is struggling with writing her semi-autobiographical first feature while living in New York. To gain the perspective she lacks, she calls her mother, Aisha (Yto Barrada). She asks the difficult question she hasn’t been able to ask for nine years: What was it like for her, a traditional Moroccan woman living in Casablanca, when Bouchra came out? The unspoken question behind that, of course, is far sadder, as Bouchra really wants to understand how her mother has been able to maintain a relationship with her despite never discussing her romantic life. In the nine years since she wrote her parents a letter confessing her truth, Bouchra and Aisha’s relationship has been strained, with a whole important area of Bouchra’s life essentially off-limits in any conversation. She wants to work through it in her film, but can’t do it without this essential piece of the puzzle. However, Aisha isn’t quite ready to talk about it yet. As Bouchra works through her past, will she find the answers she craves and be able to complete her film?
If this metacinematic, semi-autobiographical story of queer acceptance were all that Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s “Bouchra” had to offer, it would still be worth watching. Using actual conversations between Bennani and her mother as a jumping-off point gives the film an emotional honesty that cuts right to the heart, holding nothing back even though the characters often do. There’s real pain on both sides of the conversations between Bouchra and Aisha, and the filmmakers honor both sides equally, extending empathy to both parties even in their worst moments. This is especially important given the film’s biggest aesthetic choice: everything is rendered in 3D animation that looks straight out of a mid-2000s video game, and the characters are represented as anthropomorphic animals (coyotes, in the case of Bouchra and Aisha, but many others).
The animation occasionally has a photorealistic quality, especially in the cityscapes of New York and Casablanca, and utilizes light in striking ways, adding a darkness that reflects Bouchra’s mental state. The characters, however, often appear stiff, approaching uncanny valley territory due to their limited range of expressiveness. While you’d think that this style would have a distancing effect, that’s not actually the case. Instead, the incredibly natural-sounding dialogue helps these stiff humanoid animals feel more like human beings, deepening the audience’s connection to the characters. Barki and Bennani milk the limited range of the characters’ facial expressions for all its worth, carefully choosing moments to go for an impactful close-up. They mostly rely on the vocal performances, which overflow with such genuine, honest emotion that they don’t need much else to hit home.
The mixture of fantastical animation with documentary-like techniques works incredibly well, but the film’s metacinematic aspects aren’t quite as successful. Jumping between scenes from Bouchra’s present-day life and her memories, as she captures them on film, the film lacks a strong grasp of the passage of time within each of its two story strands. It’s not difficult to tell the two timelines apart, but figuring out how much time has elapsed since the last scene in each timeline is near impossible. Thankfully, this doesn’t impact the film’s overall emotional effectiveness, but it can be a distraction in the moment, and the film doesn’t need any more distractions.
As it is, many will attempt to make a distraction of the film’s steamy sex scenes, for all the wrong reasons. No, seeing an anthropomorphic coyote making out with anthropomorphic reptiles and amphibians isn’t something you see every day. However, while the explicit nature of these scenes marks the film as inappropriate for children, they’re shot so evocatively that it’s hard not to see them as scenes that will spark either a sexual or artistic awakening in the film’s intended audience. That may be a relatively small number of people, but “Bouchra” has a big enough heart for everybody. Between the animation style and the decidedly adult content, the film’s ultimate sweetness is completely disarming. It doesn’t come out of nowhere, though, as it’s rooted in the same emotional honesty that marks all of the film’s dialogue. That quality will make it a classic of queer cinema for years to come, but its unique wavelength will make it a film that means everything to young adults who are already on that wavelength, and that makes it worth everything.
