You Resemble Me
In France of 2015, in the throes of momentous cultural turmoil and violence, a block of metropolitan Paris was destroyed in an explosion laid at the feet of Hasna Aït Boulahcen – the first reported female suicide bomber as she was called on multiple news reports. Over the days and months that passed interrogations into the life of the party-goer friends called the ‘cowgirl of Paris’ led to questions about how she could have been drawn into the radicalization of the terrorist cell that masterminded the bombing and eventually the realization she was as much a victim as anyone else caught in the blast, trying in vain to escape the group she had fallen into. But still the question remained, how had she ended up there?
Dina Amer’s turbulent whirlwind of broken emotions and torn hopes doesn’t try to answer the question; it wants to thrust its audience into it, to feel what Hasna went through even as it recognizes the futility of ever actually knowing her. Like an electron Hasna is not one person but many, a superposition of acts and events and effects and emotions which can never be fully understood because even to look at her is to change who she was. Pulled from her sister Mariam (Ilona Grimaudo) at a young age and thrust into France’s foster care system, Hasna never develops a concrete sense of self, instead flowing from place to place and situation to situation seeking either escape or return to Mariam. Unable or unwilling to confront her own emotional issues she instead searches for magic talisman to fill the hole in her life, from drugs and dance clubs to an attempt to join the army and finally into religious fundamentalism and extremism.
Following in the footsteps of Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, Amer replicates Hasna’s confusion of self with literal confusion of self, casting four different actresses (including herself) as the adult woman, switching between them as Hasna flows between the different parts of her life and attempts to keep them from crashing into one another. When Buñuel did it he wanted to showcase something about the unknowableness of women from a purely possessive viewpoint. Amer turns that lens away and back on the world, condemning the vagaries of societies views on women to the point where no one could tell who Hasna actually was, mistakenly naming several different people (many still very much alive) as the dead victim.
It's a chaotic bit of filmmaking, ignoring explanation of background or context to plunge the audience into Hasna’s headspace. She doesn’t know what she’s doing or why, so why should anyone else have such clarity? Nor does Amer stop only with her narrative whiplash, eventually replacing her film with multiple versions of itself as it moves from dramatic recreation into documentary, bringing on Hasna’s real friends and family to explain how hollow the notion of answers or catharsis is. Everyone has their own view of Hasna, everyone sees her as some reflection of what they see in themselves and no one realizes there was unique individual who was both none and all of those things.
Culturally damning without finger pointing or accusation, on both the French and immigrant side, You Resemble Me aims for truth while acknowledging the impossibility of the task. Amer’s questioning without answers is difficult by design, recognizing from the outset that there are no answers that will satisfy anyone, least of all Mariam who cut her sister out of her life and blames herself and that decision for what became of her sister and asks ‘what if things had been different?’ Like everything else around Hasna, there is no answer and there never will be.