Four Daughters (2023, Kaouther Ben Hania) (Patreon)

53/100

Veers so close to drama therapy that I kept wondering whether my presence as a viewer were strictly necessary. There's compelling tension in Mom constantly being morally upbraided by the much more progressive (or at least less misogynistically reactionary) actor who's ostensibly portraying her, but it's hindered by the way that Four Daughters always remains a purely conceptual exercise. It's as if we're observing the rehearsals for a movie that never actually gets made. And that's equally true, strangely enough, of the narrative feature, the documentary, and even the hybrid form. They're all permanently incipient, somehow. Ben Hania has clearly bonded with the family—they all keep addressing her directly, with casual intimacy—and consequently may have been reluctant to go for the jugular; given how little we see of the eldest two daughters' recruitment by the Islamic State*, the film's primary subject ought to be, in essence, disastrously bad parenting, and while I didn't need outright condemnation (and we're getting some of that from the actor, in any case), I'd have preferred stronger structural shaping in that direction. That the two younger daughters are constantly laughing and at even warmly reminiscing about blatantly horrific things Mom said and did (e.g. everyone treats it as quite unremakable when she offhandedly notes that she detests girls and didn't want any daughters, much less four of them) confuses matters in a way that seemed more troubling than Ben Hania was prepared to acknowledge, though that may just be me imposing my own values upon another culture. Regardless, this ultimately seemed less satisfying to me than a conventional doc titled Two Daughters (the elder two) might have been.

* Nomenclature's grown more confusing to me over time, seemingly shifting from ISIS to ISIL to Daesh (with this film mostly using the last in subtitles).