TRIBECA 2019 REVIEWS: Michela Occhipinti’s brilliant and poignant FLESH OUT examines the relationship between women and eating

Michela Occhipinti’s brilliant and poignant FLESH OUT examines the relationship between women and eating REVIEW at Tribeca 2019

There’s been plenty of films examining the relationship between women and eating – and how women are pressured into eating a certain way in order to conform to whatever the “ideal” for female bodies prevails to be in any given male-dominated culture.

Classics like Henry Jaglom’s Eating come to mind, as well as more recent entries like Marti Nixon’s To the Bone. Of course, the common denominator in those films revolve around fat shaming and the impossible thinness women feel compelled to achieve be it by anorexia, bulimia or outright self-starvation.

Indeed, in Western culture, things get so insane, models have actually died of malnourishment in the quest to go skeletal for unreasonable demands dictated by men who almost seem to be seeking a frail design recalling prepubescence. In other cultures, however, the very same mechanism of male objectification of female bodies actually works in the reverse. One such example of this is captured in Michela Occhipinti’s brilliant and poignant Flesh Out.

Set in Mauritania, the film depicts a local custom there known as “gavage” – a months-long process of a prospective bride gorging herself several times a day.

The goal?

Plumping herself up to look more full-figured and therefore, by the standards of that culture, more attractive to the groom. While those of us who are constantly diet-conscience in the West may relish the idea of overeating to their heart’s content, it’s actually a brutal process.

Six meals a day, midnight snacks and to the point of vomiting if need be (and the vomit, too, must be eaten).

The tradition is brutally enforced by family members and even hired consultants who literally beat and torture the women into fattening themselves up like a Christmas goose for the pleasure of their future husbands. Giant bowls of rice, cous-cous and camel meat are paired with liters of milk to wash it all down.

There’s nothing fun about this, and very quickly, it becomes sickening to watch.

Occhipinti patiently force-feeds us the grueling hours of pain and sadness as we watch the plight of the protagonist, Verida (via a stellar performance by Verida Beitta Ahmed Deiche). Intimate scenes are set in sparse rooms which feel too cramped to properly accommodate the relentless serving of meals. Lips catching morsels and fatty fluids have viewers squirming not with open disgust, but helpless enthrallment. Just as Verida is trapped in the customs of her people, so too is the viewer caught in tight frames that feel claustrophobic and confining. Even when pleasant interactions with her younger sister prevails, this horrid practice is always looming as a threat to health and happiness.

Juxtaposed to these sequences of compulsory gluttony are Verida’s dalliances with freedom. She finds retreat on the roof of the apartment building she lives in, grateful for a space under the open sky. Hangouts with various friends who range from living in a far “freer” lifestyle based on Western mores (including the obsession with staying thin) provides a clean break from the oppression she feels. Associating with other more traditional friends who themselves are struggling against the gavage and even the idea of arranged marriages as a whole offer her an alternative way out. Flirtations with an unexpected suitor fills Verida with self-empowerment, even when it falls afoul of her mother’s approval.

All of this is delicately handled by a deft directorial style commanded by Occhipinti with subtle poise. So much of the film is so quiet but for the smacking sounds of large meals being chewed and slurped. The louder scenes tend to be celebratory like an all-girls soiree where friends can let it all hang out in private. The film makes us live with what Verida has to live with: her subjugation, her search for escape, her bravery, and her internal struggles – all without tedious monologues or overdramatic gesticulation. For Occhipinti, a first-time Italian director, it’s a triumph in how she shows the exact same oppression of women via food politics through a reversed mirror. Cultural prisms thinly disguise the transgressions so many Western moviegoers are both guilty of perpetuating as well as fall victim to. And in so doing, the endless progression of subtle institutional misogyny finds filmic expression in the aptly titled, Flesh Out, reminding us that gender relations are all too often a superficial and petty matter.

TRIBECA 2019 REVIEWS: Michela Occhipinti’s brilliant and poignant FLESH OUT examines the relationship between women and eating