Têtes Brûlées – BFI London Film Festival Review
12 year-old Eya’s (Safa Gharboui) favourite person in the whole world is her older brother Younès (Mehdi Bouziane). She loves when he picks her up from school on his motorbike, and he lends her his earphones as they fly home through the streets of Brussels. She loves hanging out with his friends, who treat her as one of the gang. She likes to wear his clothes, though he laughingly tries to stop her. He is the person who makes her feels the happiest, and the safest.
And then, after a horrible accident, he dies. Not able to talk to the rest of the family, who are drowning in their own grief, Eya is suddenly adrift. Têtes Brûlées follows her through the grieving process immediately after his death, up to his funeral.
Têtes Brûlées, the debut feature from Maja Ajmia Yde Zellama, is a simple, quiet movie, low on events. We have around twenty minutes exploring the bond between Eya and Younès – clear from the very first scene when we see her outside the school gates, grinning at the sound of his motorbike pulling up – and an hour at her side after he’s gone.
The bulk of the movie takes place at the mourning prior to the funeral service. Downstairs, the wider family are gathered in the living room. The women are collected in a grieving clump, wailing and weeping. We see Eya regard them, tears in her own eyes, but not able to relate to their way of expressing their sorrow. While much of their loud grief is real (her pregnant sister’s is so visceral, it’s hard to witness), there’s a performative nature to some of it. There are whispered judgements about how some people are dressed, or behaving.
Eya keeps getting dragged down there by a well-meaning brother-in-law to be with the rest of her immediate family, when all she wants is to be upstairs, with Younès’s friends. They are hanging out in his room, where they always used to be together – sometimes quiet, sometimes laughing, sometimes praying, sometimes dancing. There’s no need to pretend there. The young men offer her a quiet, unjudgmental comfort that’s not to be found in the theatre of grief downstairs.
Zellama’s film is loosely based on her own experience of losing her beloved older cousin when she was eleven, and Têtes Brûlées does indeed have the texture of something that comes from real, messy life. She has a wonderful grasp on the textures of grieving – the way that life moves stubbornly on, with the reveal of a friend finally having gained his law degree, an unexpected coupling, and the new dance that Eya has learned. One of the loveliest moments sees the 12-year-old choreograph her brother’s friends in a rendition of ‘the wave’; the four men and the girl holding hands and moving together joyfully against the tide of sorrow.
There’s a breathtaking tenderness to Têtes Brûlées, an innate knowledge of how we offer and receive comfort without even saying a word. Most moving of all is the depiction of a group of young men with the gentlest hearts, who make a devastated girl believe that perhaps her world hasn’t completely ended after all.
★★★★★
