Coming-of-age counts are like sand by the sea, and the field of queer self-discovery stories has often been praised. The approach that the French Hafsia Herzia in “The youngest daughter“Chooses, surprises anyway: In her third feature film, the director tells in five chapters named after the seasons of a young Muslima who grows up in a Banlieue of Paris and only slowly discovered (and even more slowly accepted) that she feels attracted to women.
It remains a bit brittle stylistically, and narrative also bumps it a little. Nevertheless, it is not just Herzia's female look at a lesbian coming-of-age story that makes her film interesting. The decision is even more convincing to get rid of the overly known patterns of similar films and to have their protagonists struggle against internal instead of external obstacles.
Fatima (Nadia Melliti) first has to admit to herself that she likes women.
Fatima (Nadia Melliti) grew up in a suburb of Paris as the youngest of three daughters. It is spring, the school year is slowly coming to an end. Fatima will graduate, the traditionally Muslim but liberal parents have worked towards all three daughters. At school, the mostly jogging pants and football jerseys prefer Fatima with the boys, despite their pubescent machohabes and the sexist sayings. She herself has a friend she only hits secret, and apparently more because society and its religion expect it from it.
Because actually Fatima is on women. A knowledge that she first allows you to slowly in the last school year, then only slowly in the first Unimonates. At an online app, she is looking for dates that she first questions for lesbian sex before she actually has it at some point. But even when she gets to know and love the medical student Ji-Na (Ji-Min Park), her sexual orientation for Fatima continues to be anything but an openly lived naturalness …
Bumpy ellipses
The French cinema is rich in films about the Banlieues, those who are cited metropolises in which families with a migrant background often live in comparatively cheap apartment blocks. The author Fatima Daas, who published the autobiographical novel “The Youngest Daughter” five years ago, also comes from one of these Banlieues. Hafsia Herzia, in turn, started her career as an actress. She brought her first cinema role in “Couscous with fish” with Abdellatiff Kechiche, one of the first really successful French directors from the Maghreb. And of course “the youngest daughter” inevitably also reminds of Kechiches Goldene-Palme winner “Blue is a warm color”-a perhaps unfair comparison, which he also loses in some ways, but at the same time gains in other places in an interesting way.
The attempt not to tell small, intimate history, but to make a large arc is only partially opened. In less than 100 minutes, “The Youngest Daughter” in five chapters tells the story from one spring to the next, although some developments look bumpy. Sometimes they seem to be due to the necessities of the script than to actually arise organically from the figures. Right from the start, Fatima is referred to as a lesbian by a gay classmate at school – a accusation or a statement that tempts them to beat the classmate. It is also the initial spark to admit what she is and who she loves. But it is not the only such abrupt moment either.
Ji-Na (Ji-Min Park) is Fatima's first great love-but if you fall into her so upside down, then (at least in the cinema) it rarely goes out well.
What Herzia has ahead of her mentor Kechiche is her female look, which leads to a much more sensitive representation of female sexuality than you have ever seen in Keche. If the extensive sex scenes often seem almost pornographically, Herzia almost completely dispenses with nudity, without Fatimas being less rousing. It is mainly scenes at parties or in clubs, movements, touches that indicate how Fatima is slowly changing, as she breaks out of her tough hard shell and slowly allows her desire.
What makes the coming-of-age history unusual is the lack of external obstacles. As a viewer, you are waiting for the fact that at some point Fatima is questioned by her parents or her environment that she is convicted as a Muslim for her lesbian feelings. But nothing of the sort happens (at least not explicitly). This may be described as unrealistic, but it will definitely take off “the youngest daughter” beneficially from many other gays or lesbian coming-of-age stories.
Not least thanks to the convincing representation of the debutante Nadia Melliti, Herzia succeeds in telling about the slow change of a young woman who has to struggle with obstacles that she stands in the way. It is only when Fatima succeeds in accepting her Muslima and being a lesbian as two facets of her personality and no longer as an insurmountable contradictions, she finds (almost?!) Entirely to itself.
Conclusion: Not everything of Hafsia Herzia's ambitious coming-of-age drama is convinced, especially stylistically and narrative, there is still room for improvement. However, what “the youngest daughter” makes absolutely worth seeing is the decision underlying all expectations not to confront the main character with external, but above all with its inner obstacles.
We saw “The Youngest Daughter” at the Cannes Film Festival 2025, where he celebrated its world premiere as part of the official competition.