Lotfi (Nidhal Saadi) is a forty-something Tunisian immigrant in France, carving a living out as a small-time thug. He has a home appliance store and a stunning French girlfriend, but he can't run from his past when he learns his wife (Sawssen Maalej) has had a stroke back home. Now he reluctantly returns to Tunisia where he's forced to look after his severely autistic nine-year-old son Youssef (Idyrss Kharroubi), a non-verbally and occasionally violent child Lotfi abandoned when he was two. As Lotfi's wife slowly recovers and continues juggling his professional matters. Lotfi now has to strike a bond with the son he couldn't handle before.
This family drama, a Tunisian-French-Qatari co-production, truly shook me to the core, yet simultaneously enchanted me aesthetically. So much so, in fact, that it gave me an insight into how challenging I must have been for my parents as an ASD child (although I can objectively say I was much higher functioning than Youssef is) and as an extension of that insight, it even evoked specific memories of them (particularly my dad, obviously) reading to me and whatnot as a boy. I was legitimately that moved and mentally stimulated as I watched this film. Writer-director Nejib Belkadhi fleshes this potentially very manipulative narrative out with admirable patience and restraint, and I commend him for daring to depict autism and its effect on familial relationships in such a brutally frank but empathetic and objective manner.
And what great help he has from his cast in doing that, particularly the two leads. Saadi shrewdly peels the layers gradually off his initially easygoing but selfish character to reveal Lotfi's haunted and guilty interior, helping us to then understand why he abandoned his post seven years earlier; Youssef's meltdowns and eccentricities were simply too much for him and he still struggles to get around them. Saadi expresses all this love buried under deep confusion and frustration with enormous grace and confidence. And Youssef is as demanding a role as they come for child actors, but Kharroubi (who to my knowledge is neurotypical) matches him scene for scene, presenting a misunderstood child who clearly longs to express and defend himself verbally but can only do so physically. Together, they're dynamite.
Look at Me is occasionally a challenging watch, and obviously not a barrel of laughs. But it's unquestionably one of the best family dramas, and autism movies, I've ever seen. It will drain you, but I promise in a completely eye-opening, cathartic way.
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