Palace revolt Moufida Tlatli’s eloquent silences BY PETER KEOUGH
	The Silences of the Palace Directed and directed by Moufida Tlatli. With Amel Hedhili, Hend Sabri, Najia Ouerghi, Ghalia Lacroix, Sami Bouajila, Kamel Fazaa, and Hichem Rostom. In Arabic and French with English subtitles (127 minutes). At the Harvard Film Archive this Saturday, March 20.

Tunisian director Moufida Tlatli is this year’s Genevieve McMillan and Reba Stewart Fellowship for Distinguished Filmmaking, and she’ll be on hand at the Harvard Film Archive this weekend for screenings of her La saison des hommes (2000) and The Silences of the Palace (1994). The latter, her directorial debut, is a tortured, brooding, unresolved study of the troubled path from submission to independence. It’s a flawed movie but an impassioned and provocative reflection of a life.

The life is that of Alia (Ghalia Lacroix) a young singer of traditional ballads in the late ’60s who finds herself reduced to crooning before gabbing, hors d’œuvre–munching matrons at tacky wedding receptions. With her rich mane of black hair, deep sloe-colored eyes, and full, fragile lips, she might look like Disney’s Pocahontas (that film came out the following year) and even sing like her, but she’s not nearly as blithe, heroic, or cartoonish. Tunisia might have earned its independence, but she’s not deluded into thinking she has hers.

The film’s first scene sums up her impasse; she stops singing in mid song and rushes from the room. This is just one more in a long history of female silences. When her long-time lover Lotfi (Sami Bouajila) — a political "radical" who refuses to marry her and insists on her having abortions — informs her that Sidi Ali (Kamel Fazaa), one of the last of the ruling beys and her former master, has died, she returns to the palace of her youth and relives in labyrinthine flashbacks the silences that brought her to where she is now.

The first silence is that of her mother, Khedija (Amel Hedhili), a serving girl and virtual concubine of the bey who refuses to tell the young Alia (Hend Sabri) who her father is. Alia suspects it’s Sidi Ali, who favors her and to whom she’s attracted despite his decadence, despotism, and unpleasant moustache. Their relationship flirts between the paternal and the incestuous. It torments Khedija, who sees Alia sinking into her own fate, but Alia escapes from the raucous and bawdy realm of the servants’ kitchen to the forbidden world of the beys, and to the bey’s legitimate daughter, from whom she receives her love of the lute, and later of singing.

Meanwhile, the lower classes have begun demonstrations against the regime and its French colonial supporters, and Alia learns of another kind of voice. Lotfi, an outlawed revolutionary, seeks refuge from the police in the servants’ quarters. Alia finds his ideas, rebelliousness, and youth exciting, and both he and Sidi Ali are enchanted by the beauty of her voice. The dimly delineated triangle comes to a crisis when Alia sings, against her mother’s wishes, at the wedding of the bey’s daughter. As at the beginning of the film, she stops in mid song. But from that silence emerges a nationalist hymn that clears out the outraged wedding guests.

It’s a triumph of sorts, but Tlatli perceives its ambivalence and its limitations. Echoing Alia’s song are the screams of her mother as she dies from a self-induced miscarriage. Tlatli further underscores the film’s ambiguities with her fluid, at times almost hallucinatory editing. Leaping from past to present and back again with the abrupt grace of free association and memory, she evokes Alain Resnais’s technique in Hiroshima, mon amour. The past is given its due, but Tlatli never lets go of the urgency of the nascent present, or of the baby growing in Alia’s womb.

In theme and sensibility, The Palace of Silences is reminiscent of Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern and Jane Campion’s The Piano. Not, though, in visual style. This palace is not a picturesque one, and neither are the landscapes sweeping. The shabbiness may well be deliberate; as the latter-day Alia passes from room to room in the now derelict building, it’s the inner terrain that comes to the fore, the silent, internal voices of a woman struggling to be heard.