"Beauty and the Dogs" Reveals a Labyrinth of Indifference Around Sexual Violence

In this accomplished debut feature by Kaouther Ben Hania, Miriem is a college student in Tunisia who is raped by three police officers during a campus party. When she tries to report the assault, she is shamed and turned away by a clinic that refuses to treat her without her ID (which was lost during the assault) and then by a public hospital, where the staff tells her that “rape isn’t an emergency.” Repeatedly, she attempts to file a report at the police station, only to be intimidated and told that she would be better off dropping the charges.

The film is based on a book called Coupable d’avoir été violée (Guilty of Having Been Raped), Meriem Ben Mohamed’s autobiographical account of her sexual assault by three cops when she was driving home from a restaurant with her fiancé after they’d gone out to dinner. Moreover, she was charged with public indecency by the cops who accused her of driving home with a strange man, scantily dressed and uncovered (not wearing a veil.)

For a film that indicts Tunisia’s institutionalized indifference to rape victims, Beauty and the Dogs surprisingly did not encounter opposition from the government, which actually played a key role in providing its initial funding. It was a huge commercial success in Tunisia, while simultaneously serving an educational purpose for feminist organizations in Tunisia, which screened the film for women living in more remote regions of the country. In an international context, the film was extremely timely, released just as the #MeToo movement was gaining traction in the U.S.

In drawing attention to a topic that remains largely taboo in Tunisia, Ben Hania was adamant about her choice not to show the rape, explaining that she felt too many movies trafficked in degrading, sensationalized depictions. Not showing it, she felt, was truer to the reality of rapes that go unwitnessed, of all the hidden violence that exists. It also, she said, goes back to the essential principle of depicting any horror: which is that what you don’t see is always scarier.

Beauty and the Dogs also drew attention for its highly unusual long-take aesthetic, which consists of only nine shots over the span of an hour and forty minutes. While this took an incredible degree of planning to choreograph each extended sequence – Ben Hania admitted to shooting the movie three times on a small digital camera before doing the final take – she believed that this long-take approach, by having events play out in real time, would encourage stronger identification with her protagonist and also heighten the suspense and tension of the film. Watching the camera wind and navigate through the various hallways of Tunisian police stations, hospitals, and jails reinforces the labyrinthine quality of the piece and the surreal, nightmarish quality that Mireim’s night takes on as it unfolds.