*½/****
starring Summer Bishil, Peter Macdissi, Maria Bello, Aaron Eckhart
screenplay by Alan Ball, based on the novel by Alicia Erian
directed by Alan Ball
by Alex Jackson Based on the available evidence, it's clear that American Beauty worked because Sam Mendes's aesthetic provided a spiritual component that elevated writer Alan Ball's reductive and rather misanthropic satire. If opinion of the film gets worse as time goes by, it may be because Ball's screenplay comes to the fore. Ball's feature directorial debut Towelhead is, to state the obvious, all Ball and no Mendes; it manages to be bad the very first time you see it. Jasira (Summer Bishil) is a half-Lebanese 13-year-old struggling to come to terms with her blossoming womanhood. Her mother (Maria Bello) kicks her out of the house after Jasira lets her would-be stepfather shave her pubic area. She relocates to Texas (the asshole of the United States in the Alan Ball universe), where she moves in with her Lebanese immigrant father Rifat (Peter Macdissi), who slaps her when she comes down for breakfast with her navel exposed and forbids her to use tampons when she has her period. Rifat gets her a job babysitting for next-door neighbour Mr. Vuoso (Aaron Eckhart), a military reservist restlessly awaiting deployment to Iraq on the eve of the first Gulf War. Courtesy of the Vuoso son, Jasira inherits a stack of dirty magazines and discovers how to masturbate to orgasm. Once Mr. Vuoso learns of this, he begins to see her as some potential sexual relief from a loveless marriage.
Ball's satirical point is that American culture sends conflicting messages towards sexuality that are exacerbated when immigrants from the Arab world–which has a more concrete idea of sexual morality–attempt to assimilate. He also wants to make the point, already made without a touch of superiority in Peter Berg's great The Kingdom, that the values of the Middle East and the United States closely align. Berg suggested that we share a love of wealth, power, and ruthlessly crushing enemies in the name of vengeance, while Ball sees both cultures as being ruled by emotionally insecure men threatened and demeaned by expressions of female sexuality. The heroes of the film are a married couple of social progressives who offer Jasira safe haven from her abusive father as well as a horny black classmate who nonetheless respects Jasira's boundaries. (Rifat and, more subtly, Mr. Vuoso, are threatened by his racial makeup.) While I identify with the progressives, I find it typical of Ball's liberal naivety that he can't seem to conceptualize how traditional Islamic standards of modesty can help give value to female sexuality. If this mode of morality is arguably not as developed as the fairly radical progressiveness espoused here, it is at least superior to the confusing sexual culture of mainstream America. Towelhead is finally exploitive, not in its depiction of early teen sexuality, per se, but in its rendering of Jasira a passive perpetual victim as a means of criticizing the World of Men. Everything happens to her and it's never her fault. She doesn't take any sexual initiative of her own. The porno mags and her classmate are adventures she just stumbles upon. She is after all, only a kid. Suffice it to say that in a film culture where Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl already exists, there is no excuse for a film like this.
