‘In a Whisper’ Berlinale Review: When Grief Reveals the Truth
A return home for her uncle’s funeral pulls a young woman into an uneasy investigation that brings his secret life into the open—and compels her to face the risks of revealing her own.
Lilia returns to her native Tunisia from France after the death of her uncle. She arrives with Alice, her French “friend,” who stays at a hotel and skips both the wake and the funeral. Once there—reunited with her grandmother, her mother (Hiam Abbas), and her aunt—certain secrets from her uncle’s life begin to surface. First, a man shows up at the house and is abruptly thrown out by the grandmother. Then it emerges that the uncle was found dead and naked. Later, when the police arrive to investigate, it becomes clearer that the real issue is not so much how he died, but what, exactly, is at stake in the conversation his death has triggered.
In a Whisper (À voix basse) makes it equally apparent that the film will explore the cultural, social, familial, and legal prejudices surrounding homosexuality in Tunisia. Prompted by an uncomfortable police inquiry that the family would rather avoid, attention turns to the uncle’s life—a gay man from another generation whose not-so-secret existence always provoked mixed reactions within the family. That scrutiny inevitably shifts toward Lilia (Eya Bouteraa), who begins to question what to do about her own situation: should she keep pretending that nothing is going on and that Alice (Marion Barbeau) is merely her roommate? Or should she confront her family, her friends, and even the authorities about her sexuality?
The film’s first half—discreet, elegant, even understated—gradually introduces the characters, their relationships, and the network of secrets binding them together. Lilia seems close to her aunt Hayet (Feriel Chamari), yet remains unsure how her grandmother or mother might react to the truth about her. The film gestures toward a gray zone that feels both commonplace and strangely opaque: a kind of double discourse in which homosexuality is publicly condemned or criticized, while privately tolerated. A quiet, collective hypocrisy everyone seems to recognize and nonetheless accepts as the status quo.
Fragments of the uncle’s past begin to merge with Lilia’s own investigation into his death, drawing her into the more clandestine corners of gay life in Tunisia and gradually nudging the film toward procedural territory. At a certain point, Bouzid abandons subtlety and subjects her characters to more overt, confrontational conflicts—but what the film gains in tension it arguably loses in intrigue, even mystery. This is especially evident in the relationship between Lilia and Alice, which becomes entangled for somewhat contrived reasons, seemingly engineered to produce a third-act rupture.
It’s unfortunate that the director of A Tale of Love and Desire feels compelled to shift into this more conventional narrative gear after handling the material with such striking ambiguity. More explicit conflicts emerge—among friends, through police detentions—where earlier the film thrived on suggestion. Before that turn, one of its most moving moments comes in a brief encounter between Lilia and a former partner of her uncle’s: just a few words, some letters never delivered, and the quiet human sadness of knowing that, out of fear and the cruelty of others, they were never allowed to be happy together.
