Free spirit Nina (Inès Anane) has lost custody of her daughter as a result of a court hearing centred around her unconventional lifestyle. Given her daughter back for just a weekend, Nina’s aim is to take her to see the sea, regardless of the fact that she doesn’t really have the requisite amount of money to travel or a car to get there…
The title of Sara Olaciregui’s comedy/drama short translates to “What Woman Wants, God Wants” and is an expression used to illustrate how women will, somehow or other, ultimately have their way. Nina, despite the obstacles she faces, proves this maxim to be correct, mainly as a result of her sheer obstinacy.
The opening moments instantly provide the viewer with questions as to its central character, first seen dancing the night away in a nightclub and then, not stopping to change, racing through a town centre to a hearing about access to her daughter. Adding her naturally spiky persona to the mix doesn’t paint the picture of the most sympathetic of characters. She snaps. She swears. She steals. But the obvious love for her daughter shines through as they head off on a mini adventure, encountering other females who rail against the world and try to find their place in different ways.
Ce Que Femme Veut Dieu Veut is a curious one, introducing a larger number of characters than you’d expect over a half hour runtime, presenting them with enough detail to make them stand out but not overloading the tale with backstory. The men of the piece, when they’re featured, are mostly confrontational types, either doling out unnecessary advice to Nina or being the anecdotal subject of a court case which generates the cash for a final sequence sojourn but the overall approach is that few of the folks here – male or female – are exactly angels, and the viewer’s inbuilt expectations and prejudices will feed into how they see Nina and each of the people she meets.
A road movie which spends extraordinarily little time on the road, a character study which then veers away from its initial subject to focus on other characters, there’s much here to both intrigue and confound, with the usual hitches to Nina’s final destination dealt with in neat fashion early on. This leaves the rest of the tale free to unearth capsule summaries of various lifestyles around a wine-fuelled dinner table discussion, which is authentically free of glamour and full of dialogue which is shot through with the humour and pain of everyday struggles.
Given the title, it isn’t a huge spoiler to reveal that Nina eventually makes it to the sea but, as is often said elsewhere, it isn’t the destination, it’s the journey and Sara Olaciregui has crafted a trip which abandons the familiar urgency of such a plot and stops not only to smell the flowers, but to shine a light on lives which may appear humdrum but have their own sense of vitality (and, in some cases, petty criminality).
This may sometimes feel like only the first episode of Nina’s ongoing kicks against the pricks and some of its messages may be writ a little too large because they don’t have a feature-length space in which to breathe, but Ce Que Femme Veut Dieu Veut is a captivating piece of work with a bold central turn from Anane, who reminds me of a French Mary Woronov in terms of both look and ability to take no crap whatsoever. There’s no specifics as to what may happen next to Nina but the thirty minutes spent in her company gives the feeling that she’ll never compromise and, despite the potential desperation of her situation, that’s uplifting in itself.