‘In a Whisper’ Review: Leyla Bouzid’s Sensitively Probes the Bonds of a Tunisian Family

The relationship between uncles and nieces, or nephews, often makes for touching storylines in literature. In cinema, this bond is less often explored, which makes In a Whisper all the more special. Writer-director Leyla Bouzid’s third feature, following 2015’s As I Open My Eyes and 2021’s A Tale of Love and Desire, is a poignant portrait of the desire for queer kinship not through chosen families but within one’s very bloodline—a quest for a source of emancipation within the otherwise suffocating boundaries of the family.

Lilia (Eya Bouteraa) lives in Paris with her girlfriend, Alice (Marion Barbeau), and leads an independent life as an engineer, all while remaining closeted to her family in Tunisia. When one of her uncles dies, she flies back to her homeland for the funeral, and is quickly reminded why she fled to Europe in the first place. Alice has come along to support her and mostly stays in their hotel, but the looming sense that she may show up at the family home unannounced only heightens Lilia’s anxiety. Amid the crossfire—Alice’s ill-timed demands for love, a family’s demands for marriage and children (because engineering isn’t a woman’s job)—Lilia grapples with the open secret that may have cost her uncle his life: his own homosexuality.

The figure of the uncle is lent a particularly visceral dimension due to its spectrality here. It isn’t until after the man’s death that Lilia identifies with him, and decides to nourish their bond. She’s the only one in the family to refuse the perpetual cover-up of his queerness. The more the family tries to hide the suspicious circumstances of his death, the more she becomes invested in shedding light on them and, by consequence, authorizes herself to openly live her own life.

Lila reads her uncle’s old letters, chases after his former lovers and friends, hangs out at the bar he used to frequent, and confronts the brutality of Tunisia’s laws against homosexuals. But not all homosexuals, as the state sees female homosexuality as mere provocation—meaning it doesn’t take it seriously enough to incarcerate women who have sex with each other. What Lilia wants is to both mourn the time she didn’t get to have with a beloved uncle whose plight resembles hers and honor him by refusing to accept the silence that ended up defining his life.

Lilia’s mother (Hiam Abbass) and aunt (Feriel Chamari), both torn between family duty and tenderness toward Lilia, are quick to remind her of what truly binds the relatives together: a tacit pact to repress any desire that may be counter to the reproduction of the family. The film expertly reveals the ripple effects of this agreement. In an especially powerful sequence, Lilia taunts cops for arresting one of her dead uncle’s friends for being gay by daring them to arrest her too, and her surviving uncle slaps her. She immediately returns the slap, as if, strengthened by the uncle she only truly got to know in death, she’s finally decided to break a family curse.

Bouzid’s ability to capture the complexities and contradictions of familial affection is what makes In a Whisper so impressive. She never resorts to villainizing the mouthpieces of homophobia or lets the film tip into the saccharine, and she understands the dysfunction of the family to be structural and its fears to be mechanisms of defense.

If the family is everything, then losing it is an unfathomable proposition. Bouzid paints a disarmingly convincing, and perverse, world where love overflows but always with a caveat, where pledging allegiance to the family means letting go of the singularity of the self. The sequences where the filmmaker shows family get-togethers express this with biting precision: how seductive the family’s demands to maintain its status quo can be, and how behind all the affection, the kisses, and the comfort foods perpetually on the living room table hide the most conditional forms of love. Lilia’s love is, then, a sort of debt. But after seeing how such debts are never truly written off, the price of her freedom is the only one she’s willing to pay.