Auto-fiction meets social and spiritual realism.
French-Algerian actress Nadia Melliti won the 2025 Cannes Film Festival Best Actress prize for The Little Sister (La Petite Dernière) in keeping with the festival’s rarely remarked-upon liberal prospectus. As Fatima, the film’s 17-year-old heroine, Melliti has a credibly tough but vulnerable demeanor that seems to authenticate the story of a girl struggling with her role in Muslim culture: She wears a hijab during daily prayers but at school sports a jock’s ball cap with a ponytail hanging down her back — signs of her desire to escape Muslim strictures and realize her lesbian desires. She’s told she’s “dressed like a ninja.”
Dusky Melliti’s resemblance to Sade, with the aquiline nose of a young Barbra Streisand, plus her self-possessed individuality, take the film beyond Cannes’ usual check-the-woke-boxes expectations. Melliti herself makes The Little Sister a fascinating indicator of how contemporary cultural institutions present sexual freedom while also misrepresenting it. (“You could be our little Mona Lisa,” bisexual partygoers flatter Fatima.)
Fatima studies for her baccalauréat as the first qualification for university admission, thus entering European society as the youngest of three daughters, doted upon by her homemaker mother and lordly but aloof father. She enjoys the freedom to run track at school and then sneaks out, joining lesbian subculture, where her exoticism attracts older women who see their desire in her nubile innocence.
Director Hafsia Herzi, adapting the 2020 memoir-novel by Fatima Daas, follows the modern mode of “auto-fiction” that blends elements of autobiography — a method combining the personal, the political, and the imaginary. The most telling parts of this coming-of-age story contrast scenes of Fatima’s ablutions with her prayers, her panic-driven attack on a black gay classmate, and then her nightlife, confessing her pursuit of sexual freedom, with its emotional costs.
Fatima’s secretive profile (during a phone hook-up she goes by “Linda,” at a dyke bar she goes by “Yasmine”) conflicts with the recent style of immigrant assertion. But Herzi, channeling Daas, reveals deep ambivalence — especially when Fatima is attracted to Ji-Na (Park Ji-min), a Korean medical practitioner. They share fears about ethnic tradition and orthodoxy.
Herzi focuses on the private thoughts of Fatima, who’s already half-assimilated. A German girl’s morning-after nudity is the film’s visual erotic highpoint, while Fatima and Ji-Na’s ambivalence — their common dream of a threatening, choking matriarch — takes the film beyond the same-sex fraternal games that Gaël Morel played in Three Dancing Slaves and reveals more than mere sexual license.
This complex, confessional aspect of The Little Sister forces one to recall what the bravest singer-songwriters used to do. It evokes the 1988 song “Hideaway,” by Erasure, where Andy Bell sings, “Oh my mother, do you still cry yourself to sleep?” In Herzi’s most effective scene, Fatima resists her mother’s knowing inquiry; she’s unable to come out to the person who cares for her the most. Fatima’s complication — her emotional block — surpasses the chic of Cannes-festival liberalism and touches on ambivalence and indecision. This isn’t great acting; it’s social, spiritual realism. When Fatima seeks guidance from an imam stuck in paternalistic orthodoxy — discoursing on ants, spiders, and the Koran — her inexpressible guilt and frustration capture how contemporary sexual liberty fails. It falls short of Morrissey’s great “(I’m) The End of the Family Line,” a confession that preceded Obergefell v. Hodges and that will outlast its deluded fashion.
Cannes-festival liberals pride themselves on gay acceptance, but Herzi seems dubious, despite providing the requisite rationalization when Fatima’s professor lectures that “emancipation is a question posed in the context of political philosophy.” When Fatima’s mother bakes madeleines for her daughter, the cultural conflict contradicts the easy radicalism that progressives prescribe. The Little Sister is poignant, but its fashionable Millennial ninja chic lacks Andy Bell’s and Morrissey’s profundity (“The decision is mine,” Morrissey dolefully sang) that helpfully redefined an era of self-identification. Herzi’s auto-fiction film is less moving than the struggle for self-realization used to be.
