Just Like a Woman Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

Just Like a Woman Blu-ray Movie Review

Marilyn & Mona.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 23, 2013

The world of belly dancing is typically associated with Middle Eastern countries and cultures and therefore might not seem to be something endemic to Chicago, let alone the rural highways of the American southwest. But truth be told, it's an art with a rather unexpected reach, even to the decidedly un-Middle Eastern climes of the Pacific Northwest, as I myself can attest. When I was in my mid-twenties, I fairly amazingly managed to land an incredibly exotic girlfriend. This woman, who was several years my senior, was a native of French Morocco, and made her living as a professional belly dancer (and she made a very good living, I might add). During this time period, my eldest sister got her Masters Degree here in Portland and my entire family, including my parents, came up to celebrate. During the family get together, my then girlfriend, in her flowing robes and bikini top (which of course only revealed her amazing curves and well toned midriff), gave a performance. As I’ve joked for years since, I had never seen such a combination of shock and pride in my father’s eyes. Just Like a Woman is built around this unusual world of belly dancing in an atmosphere that, like my father's long ago reaction, has a bit of both shock and pride in it as well, though the actual family responses to the protagonists' dancing skills tend toward the negative in this outing. The film follows two disparate women who band together under desperate circumstances, forge a halting friendship, and then take off on a road trip which culminates in (of all things) a belly dancing audition of sorts. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see parallels to another gynocentric road movie, Thelma & Louise, in Just Like a Woman, though co-writer and director Rachid Bouchareb mixes things up a bit by introducing a cross cultural element, giving us one American woman and one Arab-American woman. While that adds at least a little spice to the proceedings, Just Like a Woman can’t quite escape the rut it finds itself in, kind of like a car traveling down a well worn road where the tire gets ingratiated in a linear depression and refuses to budge.

As nihilistic as Thelma and Louise ultimately was (at least with regard to its climax), the film was actually a rather defiantly joyful enterprise. Something quite the opposite is at hand in Just Like a Woman, which tends to wallow in a kind of depressive atmosphere even as it attempts to detail the symbiotic relationship between two women in various throes of desperation. Marilyn (Sienna Miller) would appear to have less to worry about. She’s only reeling from finding her do nothing boyfriend having sex with another woman as well as a recent firing from her job. Mona (Golshifteh Farahani), on the other hand, has a good deal more to worry about. Her mother-in-law has been on her case due to her inability to offer up a grandchild, and in a moment of hysteria, Mona mixes up the old lady’s medications, leading to her demise.

Marilyn decides to take her fate into her own hands, and sets off for a belly dancing audition in Santa Fe. At a rest stop, she rather unexpectedly runs into Mona, whom she’s already known from her Chicago neighborhood convenience market, which was run by Mona’s husband’s family. Mona, who also belly dances, doesn’t take much convincing to join Marilyn on her road trip. What follows is a series of vignettes where the women make their way across country, often dancing for tips to make their living expenses. The two of course deepen their relationship with each other, but Mona especially is feeling the call of home, even though that prospect becomes decidedly more dangerous when a couple of detectives start poking into her mother-in-law’s death, aggressively questioning Mona’s husband Mourad (Roschdy Zem).

That aspect creates at least a bit of conflict, but otherwise, Just Like a Woman is a surprisingly low key road trip, with one notable exception. Though a really ugly pejorative term is scrawled across the store window of Mona’s husband’s market early in the film, it rears its despicable head once again much later in the film, when Marilyn and Mona encounter a white trash family at a roadside rest stop. I frankly had never even heard this horrible term (which will not be repeated here), and to find it bandied about twice in one film seems to suggest that perhaps it’s wider spread than provincial types like I am might be aware of. One way or another, Marilyn soon finds herself on the receiving end of a smackdown when she tries to defend her friend against the verbal onslaught. That sets up what is arguably the finest section of the film, when Mona must come to terms with what she’s done as well as try to help Marilyn achieve her dreams.

Just Like a Woman proves to be an acceptable enough showcase for its two female stars, but ultimately it’s a rather drab and surprisingly dour feeling affair. There's almost an analogy to that "are we there yet?" mantra that kids regularly pepper their parents with on various family journeys running through much of this outing. The film wants to be a celebration of the redemptive power of friendship, but this is one road trip that spends too much time on the journey and too little on the ultimate destination.

Just Like a Woman Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Just Like a Woman is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Media Group with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. The general appearance of this film is certainly well detailed, but it's also quite consistently soft, along with being color graded largely in either warm amber or cooler blue hues. Bouchareb and her cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne favor extreme close-ups quite a bit of the time (see screenshots 2 and 6), and fine detail is appreciably better in these scenes, though it tends to be affected at times by the sometimes very severe color grading. The film looks a good deal crisper and clearer when it ventures out of doors, and in fact the sun dappled southwestern scenes are probably the best looking scenes of the film. Some of these same outdoor sequences do offer some nice depth of field as well.

Just Like a Woman Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Just Like a Woman's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 boasts excellent fidelity and rather consistent if low key surround activity. The early Chicago scenes have some bustling ambient environmental noises and once the women take off on their road trip there are some nice immersive scenes when the two dance for appreciative audiences. The film has quite a few great sounding source cues (including one that made me laugh, an Arabic tune that sounds amazingly like the Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want", a perfectly appropriate tune for this film). Fidelity is fine, though dynamic range is fairly muted throughout this enterprise.

Just Like a Woman Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Photo Gallery (1080p). This had a fairly hard time loading on my disc.


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:14)

Just Like a Woman Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Just Like a Woman has the elements for a nice character study, and it gets there at least part of the time. But this is a kind of aimless road trip that never builds up the requisite dramatic momentum to ever achieve a really satisfying destination. Sienna Miller and Golshifteh Farahani are both excellent and the film is quite scenic, but there's a certain lethargy to the proceedings that keep things from ever totally connecting on an emotional level.