A Summer in La Goulette

This film, although pleasant enough seems to start at a really slow pace. One may find themselves wondering when it will manage to get to its 'point' as it were. The film shows the harmony between a community of Muslims, Jews and Christians in a small town in Tunisia. A Summer in Gaulette manages to nicely give a sense of community that transcends religious barriers, focusing on Youssef (muslim), Giuseppe (catholic), Jojo (jewish)and their three daughters. Their acceptance of the other religions around them are put to the test when their daughters are found to be interested in boys from other religious backgrounds. It manages to make us question how tolerant we really are, and the strength of friendship when fundamental beliefs are tested. In light of this film's rather heavy undertone Boughedir still manages to add elements of comedy and a rite of passage aspect in regard to the daughters. In spite of the comedy at the very end of the film a tragic and rather sobering fact is introduced. As their 'tolerant'microcosm will face its biggest threat from the world outside. Youssef, Jojo and Giuseppe's friendship faces their biggest test yet.

This is an idyllic image of the possibility for Peace in the world. Filmed on location in La Goulette, Tunisia, a beach resort in northern Africa, the movie tells the simple story of a summer in 1967 just before the Arab - Israel War. There are three families of different religions living side-by-side in an apartment house. The men are close friends and so are their sixteen year old daughters. It looks like the local Tunisians played many of the minor roles, and the characters and situations breathe a life of peaceful coexistence in a place that all agree is Paradise on Earth. One family is planning the wedding of their older daughter. The bachelor elderly landlord is infatuated with one of the daughters. The three teens decide to lose their virginity before the summer is out and seduce three local boys of different religious backgrounds. Claudia Cardinale, a Tunisian-born actress, makes a cameo appearance. All in all, a lovely slice-of-life film which takes the viewer to a simpler time and place when there was hope for Peace and the biggest problems were romance.

Un été à La Goulette. Political tensions in the Middle East are the backdrop. During the Summer of 1966. La Goulette, a tourist beach town in Tunisia, near Carthage, North Africa is the locale. Tunisia is now independent of France, the arabs have taken control but other religions remain and are tolerated. The background to the film is the pending Arab-Israeli War, although this is not actually mentioned until the end of the film, and the political tensions begin to mix with the sexual tensions. Three nice seventeen-year-old village girls: Gigi, Sicilian and catholic; Meriem, Tunisian Muslim and Arab; Tina, French and Jewish. They would like to have their first sexual experience during that summer, challenging their families. Their fathers, Youssef, Jojo and Giuseppe, are old friends and their friendship will be in crisis because of the girls, while Hadj, an old rich & horny Arab, would like to marry Meriem. When the girls meet three boys of mixed religions the respective girls fathers come to blows and start to question their so far cordial religious Tolerances. A nice piece of cinema that includes moments of farce, pathos and comedy behind a serious undertone. The village idiot owns the only modern transistor radio that can pick up Radio Beirut. He keeps the villagers informed of the situation whilst they continue listening to their old valve radios of local news whilst playing cards, drinking and talking of times past. The cast is wonderful - largely unknown amateurs with a few old hands. It works very well and has a feelgood factor very similar to such films as Cous Cous.

It would be difficult making this film set in the current century.

Well worth seeing.

When we're told at the end that the Arab-Israeli war started a day after the film's last scene, the transience of what we've been watching is underlined - we realize (if we haven't already) that the summer of the title is a figurative as well as a literal setting. The film is in part a largely timeless evocation of eroticism, incident and youthful entanglements, but with a highly specific undertone of racial bickering - it's a melting pot of religious and ethnic allegiances which seems in danger of blowing (the main confrontations here revolving around sex). As so often, it's mainly the men who perpetrate the worst excesses of tribalism, with the women more conciliatory, more progressive (the film sums up the tensions impinging on the younger women through its discussion, later implemented, of going naked under the veil - adhering to tradition while eroticizing, indeed scandalizing it). Despite these challenging elements, it's an episodic, easygoing film, with a languid, glistening sexiness that sometimes has a distinctly dangerous charge; in the end though it fades away rather, despite the political underlining of the closing caption.

This film wistfully evokes the memories of a bygone time and place in a seaside quarter of French Tunisia. For a brief period after World War II the population of French Jews, Italian Christians and Arab muslims appeared to coexist in a cohesive society that had formed over a hundred years. In this setting 3 young female friends (one from each aforementioned segment of society) make a pact to "lose it" by the end of the summer. However, on the eve of Tunisian Independence from France and the ramifications of living in a Muslim Arab country as opposed to a secular "Western" colony, each citizen is forced to look at the reality of their place in society. The film goes out of its way to show that everyone is the same deep down; that there are basic needs, desires and short-comings that define all humans. This, coupled with the fact that the citizenry seem to describe La Goulette as "paradise" (it was far from it...I know this first hand) simply make this film come off as the fanciful reminiscing of an old man talking about a "lost time and place" which actually never existed. Mediocre acting, but great cinematography.