There’s something deeply haunting about Four Daughters. It contains an inchoate sort of horror, whose suffocating grip isn’t felt immediately, but rather like a thick fog that trickles slowly at first, and as the film progresses, descends on the audience heavily, enveloping us in its mist. This effect, this slinking mode of the horror, seems almost inevitable, a stupefyingly brilliant byproduct of the documentary’s ingenious and near revolutionary form.
With Four Daughters, documentarian Kaouther Ben Hania has created an endlessly captivating fusion of performance, or the process of reenactment, and authenticity: she blurs the lines between the two to make profound statements about motherhood, sisterhood, what it means to uphold tradition, and most resonantly, the performance of femininity. Equal parts a work of art unto itself and world-shatteringly trenchant documenting, Four Daughters is an unmissable achievement that manages to convey that the act of filming a documentary, of re-telling and re-treading the past, is a paradoxically unending process of discovery, reckoning, and forgiveness.
In a sense, the documentary is difficult to synopsize, for so much of its meaningfulness lies in its mode, in its emotional aura and metatextual unfurling. Simply put, though, the film considers Olfa, a Tunisian woman, and her four daughters. Two of her daughters appear alongside Olfa: Eya and Tayssir, while the other two daughters, Rahma and Ghofrane, are portrayed by actresses. An actress, Hind Sabri, also often steps in for Olfa as Ben Hania has the mother and her two daughters, alongside the actresses portraying Rahma and Ghofrane, reenact first Olfa’s biography, and then the history of the family leading up to the mysterious moment that Rahma and Ghofrane left Olfa, and in turn, left the family. Olfa begins the film by saying that Rahma and Ghofrane were eaten by the wolf.
The reenactments sometimes include Olfa, and other times Sabri steps in for her, as Olfa overlooks the scene and provides direction. Sometimes we hear Ben Hania’s voice as she interjects, or when Olfa or Eya or Tayssir turn to her for counsel, for direction, or for protection, like when Olfa jovially but physically chastises Eya and Tayssir for their feminist views or dirty jokes, and Ben Hania has to tell Olfa not to hit her kids.
But the film’s genius, in addition to creatively tracing Olfa’s family’s history, is how it allows Olfa and her daughters the ability to openly talk about the horrors that Olfa suffered at the hands of her first husband, reinterpreting the facts through a feminist lens. In Olfa’s eyes, the violence she experienced was simply a social norm, but her daughters and Sabri allow her the opportunity to reassess her abuse from a feminist lens. There are also strident moments when Sabri confronts Olfa about how she enacts patriarchal ideas in her response to her daughters. These moments have such a stunning effect — an actress confronting and challenging the person she’s supposed to faithfully embody. Ben Hania so fluidly and effortlessly braids generative process into fact, greatly empowering her subjects: Olfa and her daughters, along with the actresses.
At other beautifully weighty moments, Olfa watches teary-eyed as Eya and Tayssir explain why and how certain aspects of their childhood, certain moments of violence that Olfa unintentionally exposed them to, absolutely unraveled them — these moments are delicate but unflinching, allowing the girls to express their pain not directly to Olfa, but to us as the audience. This format gives the young women a kind of strength and freedom that can’t help but have a poignant effect on Olfa, who watches from the rafters. Crucially, though, the young girls themselves seem so visibly empowered — Eya and Tayssir speak with a steady voice about what was done to them, despite Olfa’s gaze. It’s a steadiness that is undergirded by confidence, which Ben Hania’s sensitive and safe stage has allowed. Four Daughters facilitates a collective healing for the young girls and their mother, empowering them and, by extension, the audience.
At first, I felt as though Four Daughters was haunting for its subject matter, the way in which Ben Hania builds tension and suspense about what actually did happen to Rahma and Ghofrane. Ben Hania takes a deeply empathetic approach as she looks at the way that generational trauma slinks and transmutes, so when we finally do learn about what happened to Rahma and Ghofrane, we see them with an immense amount of understanding, even if it is commingled with fear and sadness.
But there is another manner in which this film haunts me, and it’s to do with its form. The artistically meta angle Ben Hania takes not just in filming Olfa and her daughters’ story, but also in her manner of keeping record of the collaborative and dialogical process, is revolutionary for how kind it is. Olfa’s daughters’ story, as it was reported in the news, felt sensationalized and unempathetic to the real lives involved in it. But in an affronting contrast to the nefarious, lascivious, and condemnatory ways of the news cycle, Ben Hania’s approach feels as though it’s coming from a desire to show Olfa and her daughters in a truthful light. Ben Hania explores where they come from, contextualizing their beginnings within a system of abuse against women, from a desire to delicately show to them, and us, how the systemic waves contorting their past greatly impact their present.
Four Daughters feels grounded in a desire to show these women, and perhaps all women, how to speak amongst themselves. It’s almost not a documentary — if a documentary records and relays facts, this film is a project, a work in progress, and a jaw-droppingly deft one at that. Walking its subjects through intimate introspection and interrogation, allowing them a voice in what would have been an ordeal where their own words were lost in the flurry of speculation, blame, bigotry, and extremism, the film is tender as it recounts, not so much so that it can find an ultimate cause for what happened to the girls and so absolve Rahma and Ghofrane of any responsibility; but rather, to show how certain cultural, societal, and familial elements work to determine present thinking and action.
Four Daughters tells a story in a way that hasn’t ever been done before. Olfa and her daughters’ story is not so much presented as it is allowed to be told and discussed by the subjects, revealing a fractured system that works to silence women. The film’s wisdom, its haunting heft that has stayed with me, lies in the fact that this revelatory work is done not only for the viewers’ benefit but also for the mother’s, her daughters’, perhaps even the actresses who take creative part in crafting the film. A documentary that is looking for a primal cause, for someone to blame, ends without prompting discussion; but the feminism of this film, grounded as it is in a desire for discussion, leaves us wanting to talk.
