You Resemble Me (Tu Me Ressembles)

You Resemble Me is a difficult film. Anything that is going to go anywhere near the Paris attacks in 2015 is going to be problematic. To come at it at an angle that could possibly convey sympathy for anyone involved has to be done with caution, to say the least. But with a blend of fact and fiction and care Dina Amer has constructed a film that poses some valid questions.

Sisters Hasna and Mariam (Lorenza and Ilonna Grimaudo) are inseparable breaking away from their uncaring mother in to the streets of Paris. They are familiar to social services who basically just give up and separate them.

Hansa is placed in a strict foster home where her identity is not respected and she is forced to eat pork. This and other issues see her on the run again and picked up by a driver. Moving forward several years Hasna is an adult played by Mouna Soualem, Sabrina Quazani and Dina Amer.

As an adult Hasna is now struggling with her fragmenting identity (hence the three adult actors playing the role), estranged from her family, she's outstaying her welcome at her friend’s flat. Jobs are hard to get with her reputation and drifts into drug addiction and eventually the wrong company, with dreadful consequences.

It would take a heart of stone not too warm to the sisters in the early part of the film as they play and wander the streets avoiding home as much as possible where their mother thinks nothing of robbing them.

And when Hasna is older, French society has little appeal or it want of her. With little aspire to she comes under the influence and prey for the fanatical, yet silken voiced, internet preachers with their promises of paradise.

The wrong doing in You Resemble Me is unarguable, there is no defence or justification for the hideous 2015 attacks in Paris. And the film doesn't go there.

I think we can allow ourselves to try and understand how a person so vulnerable could be so neglected and cast adrift, that they can only find solidarity and identity with these most evil of people. The three adult actors successfully convey that sense of loss and desperation.

What becomes obvious is that Hansa never comes to terms with being separated from her sister, compounded by Mariam refusing to return her calls as an adult.
The film takes on a more documentary aspect at the end when family and friends contribute, which is interesting and offers little more insight into the lives of Hansa and Mariam.

You Resemble Me will be released in cinemas and on digital on 3 February 2023.