Here is a neatly structured, naturalistic film that packs a great deal of believable human drama into a small space and a limited time frame. Staying true to its title, Under the Fig Trees follows one day in the work of fruit pickers in contemporary Tunisia. There are older women. There are youngish men. The film is, however, most concerned with a group of teenage girls working during their school holidays.
The camera dips and sashays between the trees to discover drama that, as would be the case anywhere, is both specific and universal. Men ponder what one can expect from women in such a society. One of the girls admits she would like a partner to be “more conservative”. Even out here in the blasted orchards of north Africa, the girls cannot tear themselves away from their smartphones. During a break they exchange cheeky opinions about revealing Instagram posts and wonder if they are compatible with their values.
Few would be surprised to learn that Erige Sehiri, the director, came up through documentary film-making. Frida Marzouk’s camera happens upon a conversation apparently by accident and then jags elsewhere to catch up with parallel chatter. The dialogue, improvised with the actors, has the testy, scattershot timbre of exchanges in schoolyards throughout the globe.
At times a sense does edge through of too much material being covered at too great a pace. Each individual exchange is, however, worked out so well that the contrivance never properly dulls enjoyment. We often praise the virtues of using nonprofessional actors, but that strategy as often generates clunky discomfort as it does naturalistic flow. Sehiri, in contrast, has engineered well-oiled machinery from her interlocking parts.
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Fide Fdhili is particularly striking as the most free-spirited of the bunch – a forceful hand waver who yearns for independence. It is she who does most to forward the film-maker’s apparent notion that we are watching a community negotiating a path to the future through the ankle grass of tradition.
A lovely, pastoral pleasure that admits its share of blood-drawing barbs.
