Morocco, France, French, Arabic - 90 min
Feature Narrative
Total Budget
US $1,482,361
Confirmed Financing
US $481,520
Contact
lamia@laprod.ma
+212661233993
A penniless novelist, who’s in love with his wife and is soon to be a father, plans to assassinate a famous author in response to a Fatwa to cynically use the reward money to offer his family a place in the sun.
Set in 1993, France. Serge and May are happy in spite of their financial problems, but the arrival of their first baby is not helping. May is a teacher, while her husband is an author who is finishing his second novel and is forced to find a job when the doctor orders May to stop working because of her delicate pregnancy. Serge starts working as a night receptionist at a fancy Parisian hotel. But the horizon remains bleak: the house they live in is not suitable for a baby and Serge's new novel is rejected by his publisher. How can they make it financially?
One night, Serge realizes that the hotel's new guest is none other than Rahman, a famous writer who has been issued a Fatwa with a massive payoff for the person who assassinates him. Serge has the idea of writing a novel about a character who wants to carry out the Fatwa to collect the prize. But as he gets overwhelmed by financial difficulties, pressure, and certain blindness, Serge starts to consider executing the Fatwa himself. This insane idea becomes an obsession that consumes him and isolates him in a sphere of absurdity and madness accompanied by some colorful companions, such as his brother-in-law, who has just got out of prison, and Nina, his extravagant colleague. While trying to save his family, Serge will gradually lose his humanity as it gets eroded by his selfishness and frailty.
I wanted to unfold a universal story that takes place in a secular West, through the prism of an oriental Muslim vision. The singularity of this film lies in this telescoping, avoiding any orientalism to shine a new light on current problems. We speak of radical Islam, Fatwa, Jihad, without being afraid to point out the real culprit: human stupidity. Serge, a man of literature, becomes a mercenary to the radicalism of the madmen of God. Khomeini had not read Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses before issuing his Fatwa, condemning him to 30 years of wandering. As with Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Nazis, Assassin’s Caucus, or the KKK, dialogue is impossible. We might as well defend our principles with our weapons: humanism, intelligence, and, for my part, enchanting and celebratory despair. Happy Lovers is the polyphonic story of characters who exist between several cultures, religions, and origins. Without dialects, we reveal a world that puts a ransom on a writer’s life for the simple reason of having written a book. And how we find ourselves in a ubiquitous world where it seems almost normal to legitimize the murder of an individual because he expressed a different opinion, or because he had a sense of humor in his appropriation of religion.
The choice of telling this story through an interracial couple allows us to get out of certain societal compartmentalization to make it a universal story and allows us to not criticize a particular religion but a global principle: fascism.
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