Bouchra

For all the ways it hits the beats of traditional queer and diaspora narratives, “Bouchra” never comes across as reductive in its portrayal of the relationship between mother and daughter or the dynamics within divergent cultures.

With these two choices, animating a biography and voicing it with the real people, Bouchra finds a delicate balance between distance and vulnerability, shielding its subjects from the rawness of reenactment while preserving the emotional texture of their lives.

Far from reiterating tired binaries – tradition versus modernity, elders versus youngsters – the film embraces the beauty of contradictions with open arms. Even when the possibility of reconciliation appears out of reach, it is the effort to communicate – whether through words or art – that brings peace.

This whole world aesthetically presents itself like an R-rated, multi-cultural Zootopia (without the one-dimensional race allegory) that shifts between English, French, and Arabic. Rather than have a specific rhyme or reason for which characters are which, I imagine this stylistic choice was made to create a remove from reality while also playing with the notion of children’s stories using animals as a teaching tool. It probably also helped cajole friends and family to participate by voicing “themselves.”

Between the animation style and the decidedly adult content, the film’s ultimate sweetness is completely disarming. It doesn’t come out of nowhere, though, as it’s rooted in the same emotional honesty that marks all of the film’s dialogue.

Stories of family hurt have a way of working you over, and Bouchra has its moments. Yet the more the filmmakers focus on the mother-daughter relationship, all while also embracing narrative self-reflexivity, the more drearily familiar — and toothless — this movie becomes.

The film’s slice-of-life scenes are generationally accurate representations of everyday life, but they aren’t given the narrative or dialectical form to actually say much about that life.