In Four Daughters‘ Look at Trauma and Extremism, Fiction Intensifies Reality
Like Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine, and Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters takes place at the confluence of two rivers: Fiction and documentary. The subjects of this hybrid film are Olfa, a Tunisian mother of four girls, and the teenage Eya and Tayssir, the youngest two of her daughters. Ben Hania fills the gaping silhouette of the mysteriously absent other pair—Ghofrane and Rahma—with two actors (Nour Karoui and Ichraq Matar), as well as a stand-in for Olfa herself (Tunisian megastar Hend Sabri). Together, the actors (including one man, Majd Mastoura, who plays a variety of male figures in Olfa’s life) re-enact significant moments in the women’s lives in an attempt to therapeutically exorcize their grief and anger.
The film is a rehearsal with no end performance in sight, the process being the point. For an hour and 47 minutes, we’re in a bare room with the actors and their real-life counterparts, all of whom are usually clad in black—perhaps as a sign of mourning, to match the neutrality of their environment, or a mix of both. Olfa, Eya and Tayssir jockey between themselves to coach the actors in how each experienced deeply intimate moments in their lives, including Olfa’s traumatic wedding night, the verbal abuse meted out to the girls by their now-absent father every evening, and the instances of physical violence dealt to them by Olfa herself.
The result is astonishing emotional rigor, particularly from Eya and Tayssir. Forced to endure hardships both new and familiar to their mother—who unquestioningly believes one of her motherly duties is to inflict the same pain on her children that marred her own life—the girls are remarkably unafraid to hold Olfa to account. Their mother is a charismatic yet thorny figure: Hard-faced and unkind at times, yet unexpectedly vulnerable and warm at others. That emotional unpredictability is why, between Olfa, Eya and Tayssir, she alone is represented by an actor in some scenes, the pain being too close to the surface for her (and her daughters being more than ready to directly confront their mother after going through psychological therapy following their sisters’ disappearance).
The conceit at the heart of the film is a brilliant one, because it dissolves all of the interpersonal barriers that might have prevented its subjects from total honesty. Olfa’s feelings aren’t spared at all during the process, but this feels like much-needed medicine, both cathartic for the girls and sobering for their mother. Even before we learn the news-making reason for Rahma and Ghofrane’s absence—a revelation that comes late in the film—Four Daughters is a fascinating, gripping watch for the depth and candor with which it explores these women’s fraught bonds. Rather than dilute the truth, then, the use of mirrored performances has an intensifying, clarifying effect on their original subjects—one so acute that it even unnerves some of the actors.