Now playing at the Red Sea International Film Festival, The Last Queen tells the half historic half mythic tale of Queen Zaphira. Half and half but a true epic once it gets going. The story takes place in 1516 Algiers. Zaphira lives with her husband King Salim and her young son Yahia under the occupation of Spain. Salim enlists the help of the corsair Aruj Barbarossa to free the land from its colonizers. In the present day, co-directors Damien Ounouri and Adila Bendimerad (who also gives a strong anchoring performance as the film’s title character) have spoken of also wanting to shed their colonized history. It was their goal to tell a story from before French colonization, in their words “to show Algerians that we existed and we have beautiful stories to tell of our past.” (source: thenationalnews.com)
Although the Spanish occupiers are there at the start of the film, they are a mostly invisible footnote to kick off the real story, and soon they’ll be kicked out of Algiers altogether. We see Zaphira biting into rose flavored snow, her teeth immune to the cold. When accused of enjoying herself too much, she replies “we are fighting the occupiers, we are not fighting life.”
Aruj the corsair explodes into the film shortly after, with his bald head smooth like a stone and slightly reddish long beard. He slices through the Spaniards, unaware his left arm has been blown clean off by cannon fire. An ornate metal prosthesis replaces the lost limb and balances his barbarism with his regal aspirations. Dali Bensallah (fresh off No Time To Die) plays Aruj with convincing menace, sensuality, and a surprising sensitivity needed for the story to take off.
Upon his arrival in the palace of Algiers he just liberated, Aruj promises his men he will mount both the king’s horse and his wife Zaphira. After she dreams of her husband’s death, Zaphira wakes up in a panic to discover he has been killed. Probably by Aruj but we don’t know for sure. Zaphira believes it’s him. Aruj quickly fills the power vacuum left by the king’s murder.
I watched the movie not knowing the legend of Zaphira, and though her actions felt predestined, it was still satisfying and unpredictable how she arrived at them. The right thing to do is obvious, but the movie makes unthinkable choices more enticing. Zaphira resists the pressures of how she should behave from the women around her, her husband, her own father and brothers. Aruj takes things the most violently of anyone. He wants her in order to consolidate power and also because he wants her. He’s destroyed her life and made himself inescapable, but he shows her respect (or at least has a man who disrespects her killed) and gives her a choice even if it’s an illusion.
The main characters are kept apart through most of the film, speaking through intermediaries or in one beautiful set up through a large white veil. This makes their first harrowing meeting on horseback all the more thrilling, culminating in a kiss that isn’t really a kiss but somehow more passionate and bizarre than a kiss could ever be. Their final scene together pays off all this anticipation in a similarly romantic and violent way.
The beautiful period costumes and set decoration carry a lot of weight for the movie. Many interior locations and close and medium shots add necessary intimacy to the story, but I at times was hoping for some more sweeping, epic locations and cinematography. Some shots by the ocean are so closed in I thought maybe there were tourists bathing just outside of frame. This created the look of a TV show sometimes, but given the budget they did amazingly well. Making do with the money they had and the tortured relationship between Zaphira and Aruj made me think of Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton in Becket many times which is a good thing.
The story takes a bit of time to rev up but once it does the two leads’ slowly orbiting performances finally crash together in a truly great second half.
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