Mtrjm - Mshahdt Fylm Halfaouine Boy Of The Terraces 1990

The celebrated bathhouse sequence is not merely exotic spectacle. Boughedir frames the hammam as the last bastion of pre-colonial female autonomy. For Noura, it is a space of tactile wonder and auditory overload—the slap of kisra dough, the chants, the steam. Critically, the camera adopts Noura’s at-first ungendered, pre-Oedipal gaze. When he begins to notice the mature female body (specifically Latifa’s buttocks), the hammam transforms from womb to prison. His expulsion signifies the violent severance from maternal space, a necessary trauma for entry into the “republic of brothers” on the street.

Criterion Collection / Artificial Eye (UK) / Tunisian Ministry of Culture print. mshahdt fylm Halfaouine Boy of the Terraces 1990 mtrjm

[Your Name] Course/Journal: Postcolonial Cinema & the Maghreb The celebrated bathhouse sequence is not merely exotic

The alleyways of Halfaouine constitute a performative arena where young Noura fails spectacularly. The paper analyzes the circumcision scene and the subsequent “test of pain” as rituals of failed interpellation. Unlike the confident Rashid of Egyptian neo-realism, Noura is clumsy, weepy, and attracted to the erotic baraka (blessing/energy) of female singers. The street’s code—loud, aggressive, homosocial—alienates him. Boughedir thus critiques Bourguiba’s modernist project of “liberating” women while hardening men; Noura’s discomfort suggests that Tunisian masculinity remains a schizophrenic construct. Criterion Collection / Artificial Eye (UK) / Tunisian

The Gaze, the Threshold, and the Revolution: Negotiating Masculinity and Space in Férid Boughedir’s Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces (1990)