Sexual allegories of National Identity in Nouri Bouzid's Bezness (1992)

Nouri Bouzid's film Bezness (1992) is an astonishingly daring work that directly confronts the subject of male Tunisians who work as sex hustlers on the streets and beaches of Tunisia's tourist towns, and is additionally interesting for the way in which it invites the viewer to see the film as allegorical of Tunisia's procerious economic and cultural position in a rapidly globalising world. The movie follows the trajectoires of three characters in the old city of Sousse - Roufa, a young hustler; Khomsa, his fiancée; and Fred, a Frenchg photographer, he can be seen also to represent gree-market capitalism itself, which is omnivorous and predatory. His sexuality, inscribed in his activities as a photographer, is no less alienated than that of Roufa, who believes he can sleep with men and women of all ages, and love his fiancée Khomsa, whom he expects to be a virgin when they marry. Khomsa expresses her doubts that Roufa's subjectivity will not be harmed aand confused by this commodification of his (specifically Tunisian) body, and by his insistence that personal identity can be located somewhere completely outside the realm of sexual desire.