We watched Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces (or The Rooftop Hopper) last night. It was a film from Tunisia and really, I enjoyed it quite a lot. On the surface (and some may say, at its core, depending on your interpretation) it was a coming of age story about a boy, Noura, in those awkward stages between being a boy and a man. All the adults and young adults around him see him as still a child, but he has sincerely outgrown all the childlike games.

He learns about girls, gets overly curious and uses his youth to his advantage to investigate women more than he should be allowed (specifically, having his mother take him to the Turkish baths as if he was still younger, rather than going with his father like an adolescent).

There are some political issues at hand as well, but they were pretty underlying, and with my unfamiliarity with the Tunisian state of affairs at the time of this film.

The movie was funny and touching, and a little bit sexy. In an effort to apply it to class, however, I need to so a sort of adaptive The story of Halfaouine could be taken at face value, and in my heart I suspect that that is how it was intended. But to make it apply to the post-colonial environment of the Islamic world, you could also see Noura as a post-colonial nation himself. He’s no longer a colony (occupied by his parents) but has yet to truly become a nation (a full adult). He is floundering trying to find his own identity while dealing with issues of politics (the presidential arrests), gender (his new view of women, specifically his introduction to erotica from western magazines and his discovery of the sexuality of women), class (he begins to truly see the different levels of classes around him), etc.

Surely, the Shiek represents something, possibly the desperation to cling to older traditions, to try and revert back the pre-colonial world, but at the same time, Noura often sees the irony or idocy of the Shiek’s traditions – as horrific dream/images.

Further reading will more than likely be able to expand on these ideas, but I wanted to make sure I got them down for discussion later.

Note: these interpretations may or may not be true. I feel the same way about these as I do when I used to have to study the meaning behind certain novels where I wondered if the author had any of the interpretations in mind. Sometimes a movie is just a movie, a novel is just a novel, and a duck is just a duck.

Straylight – Guardian – Unreal: Original Soundtrack