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      From Chad, a Filmmaker and a Star Committed to Telling Stories of Home

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      In “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” the director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun works again with Achouackh Abakar Souleymane, this time on a wrenching drama about abortion.As Chad’s most lauded auteur, the director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun remains committed to portraying his sub-Saharan African homeland onscreen. Early in his career he focused on the fallout from the nation’s multiple civil wars, which forced him to migrate to France in the 1980s. But in the aftermath of the conflict that concluded in 2010, he has shifted his attention to other social ills.With his newest drama, “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” which debuted at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and reached American theaters on Friday, he takes on the topic of abortion through the plight of a Muslim woman, Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), who is helping her teenage daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio), terminate her pregnancy after a sexual assault. The film has received rave reviews, with The Times’s Manohla Dargis making it a Critic’s Pick.While abortion is in theory legal in Chad under strict circumstances, the stigma (often associated with religious beliefs) and restrictions around it push some to resort to clandestine clinics or, worse, to carry to term and then kill the newborn.In a joint interview, Haroun, speaking from Paris, and Abakar Souleymane, in N’Djamena, Chad, shared more on the relevance of their second film collaboration. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why did you decide to make this film at this moment in Chad?MAHAMAT-SALEH HAROUN I read an article about a newborn child discovered in the garbage, and all these situations of unwanted pregnancies. But I was first really traumatized by the same subject when I was a child. I was 7 or 8, and we found a baby in the garbage. Several decades later when I read this article, I said, “That’s not normal. I have to do something.” I started investigating, asking nurses, and I discovered that it was a huge problem women are facing every day, because the fact is that in Chad, in our local languages, the word “rape” doesn’t exist. We know that rape exists, a lot of women are victims of it, but there is no word to express it. It’s always as if it’s the women’s fault, like they are guilty because they are pregnant. Sometimes they deny the pregnancy or sometimes, when they discover it’s too late to even think of an abortion, they keep it secret until they have the kid and then they kill it because they don’t have any solutions. I had to tell that story from a Chadian point of view in a human way that resonates with the same problems in the United States, in Argentina, in El Salvador, and in other countries in Africa.ACHOUACKH ABAKAR SOULEYMANE It’s horrible because if you’re not married and you are pregnant, you cannot talk about it. Sometimes these young women are just on their own. If you’re raped, you don’t talk about it, you just deal with it. As a woman, as a single mom, I was happy to be that person that can show it to the whole country and tell women that if this happened in your life, it’s happening to a lot of other women, and you can do something about it.Achouackh Abakar Souleymane in a scene from the film.MUBIDid you or the film face any pushback from government officials or religious groups?HAROUN When we were in Cannes, people said a lot of things against the film on social media, but they hadn’t seen it. But then when we showed the film in Chad, no one said anything because it’s just the reality. We even have some support from the government. I remember the Ministry of Culture was very happy and we had also a state minister at the screening. He called my assistant the day after and said he wanted to organize his own screening for the whole government because he thought that the film should be shown to all those people who don’t know a lot about this subject. I refused because you never know with politics; sometimes you are manipulated. But it was really well received and even for Achouackh, who being in Chad you might think she could be a victim of hate, she has only received congratulations.ABAKAR SOULEYMANE People would come up to me and say, “You are so brave for being able to do that.” That was shocking.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Watch Time Stand Still in ‘The Worst Person in the World’

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      The director Joachim Trier narrates a fanciful sequence from his film, starring Renate Reinsve.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Ever wish you could put a pause on your current life decisions to explore a different option? The Norwegian film “The Worst Person in the World” takes this question literally in one scene.The 30-year-old Julie (Renate Reinsve) is in a relationship with an older man, Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie). But she recently met Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) at a party and was smitten by him. To consider how things might be with Eivind, Julie — and the film — stop time so she can go across town and see him. As she wanders through Oslo, everyone else but the would-be lovers are frozen.Discussing the sequence, the film’s director, Joachim Trier, said that he didn’t want it to feel supernatural.“It’s not about, oh my goodness, she’s discovered a time machine,” he said. “Rather, it’s sort of a musical romantic sequence that plays around with the idea of how it feels to be in love as if time stands still.”Rather than rely heavily on digital effects to make the moment work, Trier and his crew brought in extras to stand still around Oslo. This involved temporarily stopping traffic and sometimes having only brief moments to allow everyone to run into position and capture the shot.Trier said people in Oslo still come up to him to complain about the time he blocked traffic at busy intersections for his shoot.“But it’s become a popular movie in Norway,” he said, “so I hope people forgive me.”Read the “Worst Person in the World” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘Book of Love’ Review: Lust (Eventually) in Translation

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      Unbeknown to the author of an uninspired romance novel, the book takes a sharp turn into erotic territory in its Spanish-language release.“Who wrote the book of love?,” the Monotones once mused. It couldn’t possibly be Henry Copper (Sam Claflin), a stodgy author whose debut romance novel is so devoid of passion that it sells only two copies in his native Britain. But when an audacious translator named María Rodríguez (Verónica Echegui) reimagines Henry’s chaste love story as soapy erotica, he becomes a surprise sensation in Mexico.In “The Book of Love” (on Amazon), María is not only a remixer for Henry’s duller passages, she is also his assigned escort on his book tour of Mexico. Henry, who doesn’t speak Spanish, is excited — if perplexed — by the legions of fans who turn out, titillated by the telenovela-worthy sex scenes María added to his work without consulting him. But once several comic exchanges bring her poetic license to light, his thrill turns to rage. Choking on sanctimony, Henry agrees to continue on the tour, but only to preserve his reputation.When, and in which picturesque city, Henry and María will acknowledge their mutual affection is the burning question of this romantic comedy trifle, which offers a few laughs and many more exasperated groans. As our leading man, Claflin alternates between a pout and a wan smile, and shows all the charm of beans on toast. As for María, there is something tired and clichéd about a Mexican woman’s being deputed to help a British fuddy-duddy embrace narrative spice. It’s a shame that the movie, written and directed by Analeine Cal y Mayor, can’t see that María has better things to do.Book of LoveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      ‘Lingui, the Sacred Bonds’ Review: Love, Ferocious and Limitless

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      In this electric liberation story from Chad, a mother struggles to protect her daughter’s future and finds both herself and a world of possibility.Freedom doesn’t come easily in “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” an electric liberation story about a mother and daughter. It is fought for — and seized — by women who, in saving themselves, save one another. For the daughter, autonomy means securing an abortion in a country that forbids it. For the mother, an observant Muslim, self-sovereignty is a revolutionary act, one that necessitates a shift in thinking and in being. It means saying no, dancing, sneaking smokes and fighting when need be. It means finding new ways to be a woman in this man’s world.The story unfolds in present-day N’Djamena, Chad, where Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane) spends much of her time on just getting by. With her 15-year-old daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio), Amina lives in a humble home with a rickety gate, thick walls and a sweet, playful dog and charming kitten. For money, Amina makes small, ingeniously designed coal stoves using steel wires that she painstakingly salvages from old car and truck tires she buys. When she’s made enough, she covers her head and body, gingerly balances the stoves on her head and roams the city selling them for the equivalent of a few dollars.The family’s domestic tranquillity has already been disrupted when the story opens, though you’re as in the dark about what’s gone wrong as Amina is. The writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, however, is a fast worker — the movie runs just shy of 90 minutes — and he rapidly sketches in the story and the grim stakes for both mother and daughter. Maria has been expelled from school because she’s pregnant. (“It’s bad for our image,” a school official coolly explains.) Maria won’t name the father. And she does not want a child, partly because she doesn’t want to end up like Amina, who has suffered for being a single mother.Much as in the American independent movie “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” the struggle to obtain a safe abortion here is difficult, life-changing and profound. Narratively, the effort to secure one rapidly takes the shape of an odyssey, a voyage filled with misadventures, harrowing threats and gendered hurdles. For Amina, these obstacles include government prohibitions on abortion, empty pockets, wagging fingers and shaking heads. There’s the hectoring imam (Saleh Sambo) who questions her faith; and there’s the pesky neighbor (Youssouf Djaoro) who’s happy to flirt with her but won’t lend her money.Haroun has a gift for distilling volumes of meaning in his direct, lucid, balanced visuals, which he uses to complement and illuminate the minimalist, naturalistic dialogue. And while you worry about his characters and their fates, it’s instructive that he opens “Lingui” with a close-up of Amina, her face pouring sweat, intensely focused on something outside the frame. The light is soft and lovely, and the sounds of her progressively deeper breaths blend with the melodic music and murmurings heard in the background. A few more cuts and close-ups reveal that she is using a blade to slice open a large tire. It’s difficult, punishing work.But Amina keeps at it, keeps wrestling with the tire, and then she stands and puts her entire body into this laborious endeavor, using every muscle to extract the wires. You know this woman within minutes of the movie opening, before you even hear her name. And while you see the modesty of her circumstances, what hits you, what gets under your skin and into your head, are the dust and the sweat, her grit and her unwavering focus. Amina gets the tough, exhausting job done. And then she puts on a flowing robe and sails into the city, presenting an image — a costume — of classic, demure femininity.Haroun complicates that image beautifully in “Lingui.” The movie is about a great many different things, including the colors and textures of this world, its tenderness and cruelty. But while the story is organized around Amina’s heroic efforts to secure a safe abortion for Maria, each step in this difficult venture expands the movie’s narrative and political horizons. This is a story about a handful of specific women. It’s also about the bonds that connect them, even when frayed, and that help form a larger sisterhood that includes Amina’s long-estranged sister (Briya Gomdigue) and an obliging midwife (Hadjé Fatimé Ngoua).That sisterhood is complex and at times fragile, but it is always rooted in the lived experiences and bodies of these women. Again and again, Haroun shows you Amina and Maria alone and together, at times exchanging hugs or tenderly bowing their heads toward each other. Every so often, you see each running along a street alone, her clothes fluttering and body straining with effort. He shows feet and braids, a flash of a bared leg, the teasing glimpse of a belly. He shows you women in motion and in revolt, fleeing and escaping and at times running sly, joyous circles around the men in their lives. And, if you watch the final credits, you will hear the sounds of women’s laughter, too — a divine and triumphant coda.Lingui, The Sacred BondsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Alone With You’ Review: An Anniversary for One

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      A woman hoping for a romantic night with her girlfriend instead finds herself trapped in her Brooklyn apartment, facing down demons.In the long history of horror, lesbian relationships have been something of a fixation for directors. That fascination has produced works of camp, wildly homophobic characters and, occasionally, refreshing representation. “Alone With You,” the first feature from the writing-directing duo Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks, is the latest horror film to join this lineage. Unfortunately, its lesbian representation is so shoddy that its scares also suffer.The film centers on Charlie (Bennett), a makeup artist in New York who lives with her girlfriend, Simone (Emma Myles), who is a photographer. Charlie is excited for Simone to return home on the night of their anniversary, but as Simone becomes increasingly unreachable and Charlie finds herself locked in their Brooklyn apartment, a more sinister narrative begins to creep in. It appears that Simone is not who she says she is, but neither, it seems, is Charlie.First, the lesbian problem: The female leads never kiss (or, for that matter, touch), but there are multiple shots of Simone, who is mainly depicted as neglectful and untrustworthy, kissing a man.The horror problem is slightly less dire. “Alone With You” is often canny in its creepiness, layering ominous oddities atop each other before the jump scares emerge. But because Charlie and Simone’s relationship is already doubtful, the whole third act — including the “why” behind all this terror — falls apart. Is Charlie a tortured lover or just another textbook lesbian psycho? Either way, the film’s climactic reveal is regressive, treading the same ground as “High Tension” or “What Keeps You Alive.”Alone With YouNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters now, on demand Feb. 8. More

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      ‘Moonfall’ Review: Out of Orbit

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      Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson save the world from a rogue moon in the latest disaster movie from the director of “Independence Day.”In the disaster movie “Moonfall,” the moon goes out of orbit and starts coiling its way toward Earth, causing environmental disasters and setting the clock on humanity. Scientists calculate ellipses; screenwriters ready their exclamations. “Everything we thought we knew about the nature of the universe has just gone out the window,” a N.A.S.A. official (Halle Berry) proclaims. But for the director Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” “2012”), who treats the planet to potentially life-ending cataclysms with the regularity of dental checkups, it’s not much new under the sun.To learn more, Berry’s character, Jocinda, visits a restricted N.A.S.A. compound, where Donald Sutherland, as the staff deep-secrets keeper, appears to have been waiting, growing his hair long and listening to Mahler with a gun ready. Jocinda will need to team up with Brian (Patrick Wilson), an ex-astronaut who hates her after the fallout from an accident years earlier. Their moonshot to save the world, carried out as a rogue mission while the authorities stupidly ready their nukes, will involve traveling through space without electricity. Their seatmate — a fringe-science guy (John Bradley) whose mantra is “what would Elon do?” — should probably turn off his smartphone.This off-world adventure flirts with the transcendently goofy, but Emmerich spoils it by crosscutting to a useless narrative thread on Earth, where Brian and Jocinda’s sons (Charlie Plummer and Zayn Maloney) have been thrown together to seek safety in Colorado, for reasons that make as little sense as anything else. (Hearing that the planet is on the brink, Michael Peña, as Brian’s ex-wife’s current husband, announces, “We should go to Aspen.”)While geologic shifts have made geography fungible, they aren’t responsible for the shoddy rendering of the New York skyline. And they can’t be blamed for the dialogue, which expresses clichés in unusually direct terms: “You’re putting the fate of the world in the hands of your ex-wife and some has-been astronaut!” Better that than to trust Emmerich for anything beyond incidental fun.MoonfallRated PG-13. Dumb decisions. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Jean-Jacques Beineix, ‘Cinema du Look’ Director, Dies at 75

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      His first feature, “Diva,” a visually unusual tale, is credited with starting a new, style-focused genre of filmmaking in France.Jean-Jacques Beineix, a French film director whose debut feature, the eye-popping, droll thriller “Diva,” was much acclaimed, especially outside of France, in the early 1980s and is often credited with starting a genre of French filmmaking known as the cinéma du look, died on Jan. 13 at his home in Paris. He was 75.His family announced his death to Agence France-Presse, saying Mr. Beineix (pronounced Beh-nix) died after a long illness. Unifrance, the organization that promotes French film, issued a statement praising “his innovative, intensely visual, iconic cinema.”In “Diva,” a fan surreptitiously tapes the performance of a renowned American soprano who has forbidden any recordings of her singing, setting off a chain of complications, including blackmail. One unusual aspect of the film was that the title character was played by a real-life opera singer, Wilhelmenia Fernandez. But the most unusual thing about the movie, for that time, was its look, full of color, references to other films and odd camera angles.“Everything is seen through glass, in mirrors or as reflected from the surfaces of mud puddles,” Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times in 1982, when the movie, which had opened in France the year before, played in New York. “If a scene isn’t shot from a low angle, it’s shot from a chandelier.”Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, was also struck by the visual bravura.“It’s a mixture of style and chic hanky-panky,” she wrote of the film, “but it’s also genuinely sparkling. The camera skids ahead, and you see things you don’t expect. Beineix thinks with his eyes.”Its style was also sometimes called the new New Wave.“In contrast to the old New Wavers,” Manohla Dargis of The Times explained in 2007, when a new print of “Diva” was shown at Film Forum, “who sought to interrogate the relationship between the real and the image, the new New Wavers seized on the unreality of cinema, underscoring its falsity, its theatricality, its surface.”Luc Besson and Leos Carax were among the other directors often included in the genre, although that was not always a compliment; some critics faulted the films for emphasizing style over substance. Certainly Mr. Beineix’s subsequent movies — he made only a few more features — were greeted with mixed reviews at best.The best known of those was “Betty Blue” (1986), a drama about an obsessive love affair. Sheila Benson, in The Los Angeles Times, named it one of the year’s 10 best.“Beineix’s power is to draw us to the center of this tempestuous love affair, to feel its magnetic pull as strongly as we sense its imminent doom,” she wrote.But Janet Maslin, in The New York Times, said that the film “has a shallow, sunny prettiness and little more.” Its two leads, Béatrice Dalle and Jean-Hugues Anglade, spent quite a bit of the film unclothed.“If either of them made it through the filming without catching a bad cold, it’s a miracle,” Ms. Maslin wrote.Mr. Beineix accepted that his films might inspire ridicule as well as praise.“That’s the risk you take,” he told The Gazette of Montreal in 2001. “But if an artist doesn’t take risks, what’s left? There has to be at least a minimum of provocation in art. That’s what films should do.”Jean-Hugues Anglade and Béatrice Dalle in the 1986 film “Betty Blue,” which divided critics. The Los Angeles Times named it one of its top 10 of the year, but The New York Times described it as having a “shallow, sunny prettiness.”Cinema Libre StudioJean-Jacques Beineix was born on Oct. 8, 1946, in Paris. He loved movies from an early age, he said, but didn’t immediately pursue a career in filmmaking.“I was never the kind of cinephile who belonged to any club,” he told The International Herald Tribune in 2006. “I didn’t get down on my knees at the Cahiers du Cinema altar” — a reference to the famed film magazine.Instead, after earning a degree in philosophy and then studying medicine for several years, he took a leap of faith.“I finally left the university when I was 24,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1982, “to take a job as an assistant film director at the lowest level. I brought coffee to people and enjoyed every minute of it because I didn’t have to study anymore.”Throughout the 1970s, he worked his way up from second assistant director (including on the 1972 Jerry Lewis film “The Day the Clown Cried”) to first assistant director on films by Claude Zidi, Claude Berri and others. He gained valuable experience, but by the end of the 1970s was beginning to chafe at being an understudy.“I was seeing things done one way, and I wanted them to be done differently,” he told The Tribune.So he made “Diva,” though the film was not an instant success — largely, he thought, because it could not be easily pigeonholed. Critics in France didn’t like it, and promoters didn’t know how to promote it.A film still from “Diva.” Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, was struck by the visual bravura, describing it as “genuinely sparkling.”Rialto Pictures“Eventually, though, word of mouth turned everything around,” he said. And foreign audiences began discovering the movie. At the 1981 Festival of Festivals in Toronto it finished second in the audience voting for the event’s most popular film, behind “Chariots of Fire.”His follow-up, “The Moon in the Gutter,” did not fare as well. It was booed at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983 and flopped.Mr. Beineix’s films after “Betty Blue” included “IP5: The Island of Pachyderms” in 1992. The cast included the revered actor and singer Yves Montand, who died of a heart attack in November 1991 near the end of the filming. Mr. Beineix felt that people blamed him for the death. Shortly afterward, both his mother and his press agent, a close friend, also died. He didn’t make another feature film for almost a decade.“It’s like you’ve been punched and punched and punched,” he told the film website Nitrate Online in 2001. “It built up, and suddenly I couldn’t make a picture.”His return to filmmaking, with the comic thriller “Mortal Transfer” in 2001, was not successful.Mr. Beineix’s survivors include his wife, Agnes, and a daughter, Frida. More