“The Little Sister” Is an Intellectual Yet Passionate Drama of Sexual Identity

The movie spans about a year, in the course of which Fatima passes her baccalaureate exam (with honors) and begins commuting to university in Paris. In a philosophy class, the professor offers a lecture on the concept of emancipation, as exemplified in the work of the sixteenth-century writer La Boétie. Fatima, who’s of Algerian descent, is a practicing Muslim; she’s seen praying several times throughout the film, and when her faith is shaken by romantic turmoil, she consults an imam. Both of these characters are played by real-life professionals, the professor Ahmet Insel and the imam Abdelali Mamoun; for that matter, Fatima’s high-school literature teacher, in whose class she read Wilde, is played by the real-life high-school teacher Julie Chaintron. In deploying these real-life counterparts to the movie’s fictional professionals, Herzi yields the screen to their experience, expertise, and character, offering not just persuasive dramatic depictions but a kind of intellectual realism—the mental infrastructure of everyday life.

There’s another realm of knowledge which quickly takes its place in the drama, too, this one involving Fatima’s first date, with an older woman named Ingrid (Sophie Garagnon). At Fatima’s request, they park at a remote location, which Ingrid at first takes as a prompt for a quick hookup. But it turns out that Fatima, who has connected with Ingrid under a pseudonym, wants somewhere they can talk. Fatima asks Ingrid about her own self-recognition as a lesbian, and then asks for detailed lessons—spoken, not performed—on lesbian sex. The date is a form of education; in a sense, Ingrid’s role is continuous with that of the other trusted authority figures through whom Fatima is informed and enlightened.

What emerges is a notion—perhaps more commonplace in the explicitly multicultural U.S. than in France—of homosexuality as not just a practice but a way of life, an identity, formed in part out of the social opposition that queer people still face by way of religion, family, and the weight of tradition. That sense of identity arises all the more clearly in scenes of Fatima’s encounters with other lesbians: in the shock of recognition that passes between her and a nurse (Park Ji-min) at Asthma School, or in a charged meeting with a classmate’s older cousin (Mouna Soualem), who is instantly certain that Fatima is gay and scoffs at her denials.

As a genre, “The Little Sister” is a psychological thriller, even a film noir: a tale of a double life, which Herzi constructs with a watchmaker’s precision and an analytical clarity that distinguishes Melliti’s starring performance all the more. There’s a world of warmth surrounding Fatima—a tight-knit but not smothering family, caring teachers, sincere friends. The imam and the doctor are wise and compassionate. But Fatima isn’t ready to submit herself to judgment or opposition; she’s startlingly two-faced, her life radically divided. At home, in the neighborhood, at school, and with classmates, she’s tautly guarded. In queer circles (bars, parties, a Pride march), she cuts loose in her body language and facial expressions, bursting out with something like joy.

Herzi presents Fatima’s experience in solid blocks of self-contained and emblematic scenes that, in a film of ideas, signify ideas—sometimes all too well, at risk of feeling generic, merely illustrative. But the core of the movie is Fatima’s presence in closeup shots, which find her nearly stony, hauntedly pensive, both deeply vulnerable and bearing a defensive mask of opacity. Her fine range of seemingly similar expressions is alive with a torrential variety of emotional currents that she both conceals and protects.

Melliti is utterly untrained as an actress. Like Fatima, she is of Algerian descent, grew up in an apartment complex in a suburb of Paris, and was a teen-age athlete, a soccer player. After high school, she entered university to become a physical-education teacher, and was far along in her studies when a casting director working with Herzi spotted her in Paris, spoke with her about the movie, and asked to take her picture. Herzi was instantly taken with the photo of Melliti and, after auditions, offered her the role. Remarkably, Melliti’s personality converged with the role in surprising ways. According to Le Monde, she said “nothing to anyone, neither to her mother, nor to her brothers and sisters, nor to her friends,” about being cast in the movie and acting in it, until the day she left for Cannes, for the film’s 2025 première. As Melliti explained, “That’s how I am in life: I don’t like revealing my processes.” In that sense, she was already embodying aspects of her character before the camera ever rolled. The result is a cinematic Möbius strip joining performance and reality, the expressivity of concealment and the essential inward unity behind a double life. Through Melliti’s performance and Herzi’s alertness to her personality, “Little Sister” fills the screen with the passionate physicality behind inner life. ♦